NEW YORK: An Indian-origin lawyer has been appointed by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio as head of immigrant affairs in his office and will be responsible with seeing through the city administration’s immigration agenda as well as improving outreach to immigrant-owned businesses.
Nisha Agarwal, daughter of Indian immigrants and a Harvard Law School alumnus, will be commissioner of the NY Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.
In announcing the appointment, de Blasio said Agarwal has a passion for social justice, an attribute he said she learnt from her Indian parents and shaped by “hearing stories of her grandfather’s role in the non-violent struggle for Indian independence, led by Mahatma Gandhi.”
“So it’s fair to say that Nisha had extraordinary inspiration from early in her life,” de Blasio said, adding Agarwal has become one of the leading advocates in the city for immigrant communities and puts her energies to work on behalf of the most marginalized people.
Agarwal is a public interest lawyer and a leading voice in immigration reform at the local and national level.
De Blasio said she would bring to the Immigrant Affairs office an entrepreneurial drive and a proven record of enacting pro-immigrant legislation in New York City and New York State.
As head of the immigrant affairs office, Agarwal would be charged with seeing through the de Blasio administration’s immigration agenda, including establishing a municipal ID for undocumented immigrants, improving outreach to immigrant-owned businesses, and ensuring victims of crimes in immigrant communities are fully protected and respected.
“This work is part of who I am. It’s embedded in the values I was taught as a child,” Agarwal said.
“…the lessons that I’ve learned that the fire in the belly for better opportunities to speak up for progressive values, is universal. And that it’s a fire that burned in my grandfather as he marched for freedom alongside Mahatma Gandhi in India. And it’s a fire that crossed borders with my parents when they emigrated to the United States,” she said.
The Mayor said one of his priorities is to make the city more inclusive for its residents, including the almost half million New Yorkers who are undocumented immigrants.
In this regard, his administration will establish a municipal ID card program, on which Agarwal’s office would focus.
De Blasio said he wants to reach out to immigrant-owned small businesses and help them thrive and end the punitive policies that were addressed to them in the previous administration, including the unfair fines that they often suffered.
“We want to do everything we can to help get legal assistance to undocumented immigrants who are often subject to fraud by folks who try to take advantage of their status,” he added.
Agarwal said many like her are the product of immigrant families which built their lives through education and economic opportunity.
“More than three million New Yorkers were born in another country. We cannot succeed as a city unless they also succeed,” she said, adding her office will focus on working with immigrant-owned small business, and ensure that English- language learners in our schools have every tool they need to succeed.
“We will end punitive policies that put honest, hard- working members of our society at risk for deportation. And we will launch the new municipal ID program this year, that will ensure that newcomers to our city are able – regardless of immigration status – to participate in all facets of the city to sign leases, to open bank accounts, and to live their lives in the open.”
Most recently, Agarwal worked with Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Judge Robert Katzmann to establish the Immigrant Justice Corps, a new nonprofit that will recruit recent law school graduates and partner them with non-profit legal services providers to offer legal representation to undocumented immigrants.
She was previously Deputy Director of the Center for Popular Democracy, a non-profit advocacy group dedicated to advancing pro-immigrant, pro-equality and pro-justice policies at the grassroots and national levels, which she co-founded in 2012.
She was also involved in mandating pharmacies to provide interpretation services for speakers of the seven most common languages in the city, innovating new ways to bring immigrant communities out of the shadows, the Mayor’s office said.
Agarwal is not the only Indian-American serving in the new mayor’s cabinet.
Last month eminent Indian-American physician Ramanathan Raju was appointed as New York City’s Commissioner of Health and Hospitals Corporation, a network which has a dozen hospitals, a health plan and more than USD 7.3 billion in revenue.-PTI
