Drive Opens on Sign-Ups for Amnesty

A publicity campaign to encourage thousands of illegal immigrants--erroneously left out of the one-year amnesty program that ended in May--to apply under court-ordered extensions of the program has been launched by immigrant-rights groups across California.

The $50,000 state-funded campaign hopes to attract immigrants who were denied amnesty or discouraged from even applying due to overly restrictive eligibility requirements that have been successfully challenged in the courts.

Immigrants’ advocates maintain that potentially tens of thousands of immigrants may benefit under the liberalized requirements. But they charge that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has done little to get the word out to potential applicants.

“We’re attempting to do the publicity that INS has never done and never intends to do,” said Helen Sklar, a lawyer with the National Center for Immigrants Rights, one of the campaign’s coordinators.

She said that the INS has also resisted several legal efforts to extend the amnesty deadline for groups of immigrants who were excluded from the process because of “incorrect INS interpretations” of the law.

A two-week media campaign will feature multilingual radio and newspaper ads aimed at various categories of immigrants who were denied amnesty or never applied in the belief that they would not be eligible under INS requirements.

Sklar said the campaign includes telephone counseling hot lines for potential applicants. The numbers in Southern California are (213) 388-8693 and 747-4097; in Northern California, (415) 554-2444.