The city wants new immigrants to know their options for becoming American citizens, and is taking its message to the streets.
The Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs will run multilingual ads on LinkNYC kiosks starting Monday, Citizenship Day, that provide information about the city’s services for applying for citizenship. The ads encourage immigrants to contact 311 and ask about the NYCitizenship program which provides free legal help and financial consulting to eligible applicants.
The mayor’s office said about 54 percent of the city’s 3.1 million immigrants are naturalized U.S. citizens. Roughly 660,000 New York City immigrants who are lawful permanent residents, such as green card holders, are eligible to naturalize, the office said.
Last year, 800 naturalization applications were filed through NYCitizenship, according to a representative from the office.
As of Sunday, there were 1,735 operational LinkNYC kiosks throughout the five boroughs. The city aims to ultimately install 7,500 kiosks, replacing old pay phone stations.
Correction: An earlier version of this story should have noted there are no plans to run the ads in print publications.
