< Back to front page Text size – +

US immigration field office opens in Lawrence

E-mail|Link|Comments () September 15, 2009 11:00 AM

By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff

LAWRENCE -- Massachusetts’ "immigrant city'' is getting its own federal immigration agency today.

Federal officials from as far away as Washington, D.C., will open the city’s first field office of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is in charge of processing applications for work permits, green cards, citizenship and other benefits.

Previously, immigrants had to journey 30 miles to the John F. Kennedy building, a forbidding skyscraper in downtown Boston, but now they can take their citizenship tests, apply for legal residency, and get fingerprinted at 2 Mill St. in Lawrence, in the shadow of the hulking mills and smokestacks that earned the city its nickname more than a century ago.

"Lawrence, Massachusetts, is a very fitting place for an immigration facility,'' David Santos, spokesmen for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, said at the opening. "There's going to be a significant segment of the immigration population of the state that's going to come to this building.''

The new office serves the counties of Berkshire, Essex, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, Middlesex, and Worcester. Federal officials expect to process 13,000 applications in the first fiscal year alone.

Lawrence has one of the highest proportions of immigrants in the state – 35 percent of the 71,000 residents are foreign-born – and it is the most Latino city by far, with 70 percent of the population.

In today’s ceremony, US District Judge Nancy Gertner will swear in 15 new citizens from Albania, Brazil, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Ukraine, Jamaica, Kenya, Liberia, Moldova, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Tunisia, and the United Kingdom.

Officials will also recognize Eartha Dengler, an immigrant from Germany and the founder of Immigrant City Archives, and Eva Millona, executive director at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition and an immigrant from Albania, for their work on behalf of immigrants.

Lawrence is known as an "immigrant city" because of the successive waves of immigrants that poured into the city starting in the 1840s and continuing today. In the 1800s and 1900s Lawrence attracted French Canadians, Germans, Italians, Irish and more to work in the textile mills that still dominate the city’s landscape, though they are long defunct.

In the mid-to-late 1900s the city had significant immigration from the Dominican Republic and elsewhere in Latin America, and more recently, from Vietnam and Cambodia.