Reflections on a Mega Citizenship Drive

One of my jobs at work is coordinating "citizenship clinics:" one-day events where we bring together lawyers, paralegals, and trained volunteers to help Legal Permanent Residents apply for naturalization. The volunteers mostly take charge of typing - or, sometimes, handwriting - the appropriate forms. The N-400 Application for Naturalization is 20 pages long, and depending on your income level you either have to enclose:

1. $725; or 
2. $325 plus a completed I-942 Application for Reduced Fee; or
3. a completed I-912 Application for Fee Waiver

All of these forms are written in legalese, and getting them wrong can lead to your deportation. As you may imagine, lots of prospective citizens are too intimidated to fill them out solo. That's where citizenship clinics come in.

In December 2017, I got an email from my contact at the legal department of Gay Men's Health Crisis. She had copied someone from the legal department of Catholic Migration Services. They had a question: could you help us with a citizenship clinic that's much bigger than average?

Eventually I found out: they were asking for help with the biggest citizenship clinic ever attempted in the United States. They had 9 partner agencies mixed up in it - and New York Cares made a 10th. That clinic happened yesterday.

Naturally, when I got that email from the unlikely alliance of GMHC and CMS, I dove straight in. I've spent nearly 6 months recruiting and training and communicating with all kinds of volunteers. Volunteers who can stand at the gates and direct people to the correct building. Separate volunteer teams for intake forms, N-400 forms, and fee waiver forms. Volunteers who can interpret for speakers of Spanish and French and Russian and Mandarin and Korean - it's only fitting that yesterday was Pentecost! In the end, we had over 60 volunteers from New York Cares alone.

We helped about 300 people file for citizenship.

I'm super proud of our results, for a couple of reasons.

First, I'm damn happy with our efficiency. It's hard to get 300 of anything done in 9 hours. Lest you think we somehow filtered for only the easiest cases, I'd like you to know that I personally handled all of the following:

• A woman who'd been married and divorced to the same 2 men twice each
• An individual who'd had 13 part-time jobs in the past 5 years
• A former resident of the US Virgin Islands who routinely spent weekends in the British Virgin Islands, and therefore had about a dozen international trips to account for
• A man whose wife had brought along a Mary-Poppins-esque bag with every piece of official-looking documentation they had
• An old man who had: been a policeman back home; been arrested once before; and been placed in deportation proceedings that were eventually dismissed, but had no idea how he was supposed to document any of the above

And I was only 1 of 50 people on the N-400s Team.

Second, we met a huge community need here. I don't have to tell you that it hasn't been a great year for foreign-born residents of the US. From being shouted at by racist people on subways and in cafes, to fearing that they'll be shot by racist people in bars, to wondering whether ICE will show up at their door, to finding out their relatives in refugee camps and majority-Muslim countries will be abandoned by the international community, life's been stressful.

Many legal permanent residents are more desperate than ever to naturalize, so that they'll be safe and have a voice in the future of this country. The record numbers of applicants have stretched USCIS resources, to the point that people who applied yesterday might not get naturalization interviews until November 2019. They'll be taking the Oath of Allegiance in early 2020.

You know what else is happening in 2020? An election that these folks can vote in.

No wonder there were lines.

Third, this project happened at the Bronx Zooe. Before I go on, let me stress that the Bronx Zoo is an amazing place and has done a lot of good for wildlife conservation. 

Now, 5 years ago I wrote a history thesis on the un-cheerful topic of human zoos. In the course of my research I learned the story of a man called Ota Benga, a pygmy from what was then the Belgian Congo. In 1903 an American man named SP Verner bought Ota Benga from the infamous Force Publique and brought him to the St. Louis World's Fair as an exhibit. In a testament to how badly things were going in the Belgian Congo, when the fair was over Ota Benga begged Verner to help him stay in America. Verner took that to mean "please drop me off at the American Museum of Natural History and then never check on me again." AMNH, in turn, took that to mean "please sell me to the Bronx Zoo to be displayed in the primate house, and bill me as the missing link."

No, I am not making this up. For a few weeks in 1905, the Bronx Zoo literally displayed a black human - a black immigrant - alongside monkeys and apes.

I can't undo the ugly things that happened to Ota Benga. I can't undo the ugly things that are happening to immigrants and refugees in 2018. Nor can I promise anyone that the world will stop doing ugly, inhuman things to displaced human beings. But, I can absolutely help turn the Bronx Zoo into a place where immigrants are welcomed and embraced as the New Americans they deserve to be. Yesterday, it was a place for hope and for dreaming of a better future.

Ota Benga, that one's for you.