Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs: 2021 Report

The New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA) supports and empowers over 3 million immigrant New Yorkers who speak over 200 languages. Recognizing that immigrant New Yorkers make up almost 40 percent of the City’s total population, and that 60 percent of New Yorkers are immigrants or children of immigrants, MOIA works to close the access gap between immigrant communities and government services. This report presents a snapshot of the City’s work in this area but does not cover the totality of work that other New York City agencies do to serve immigrants. In 2021, the city entered its second year of the COVID-19 pandemic and focused its efforts on recovery programs and the key to NYC: vaccinations. MOIA continued to ensure that immigrants were included in these efforts through advocacy, outreach, informationsharing, and community empowerment. This includes working with the new federal administration to push for immigration reform, combatting the inequities and impacts of COVID-19 and other disasters, and preparing for the transition and institutionalization of legal and language services. Some of these efforts included: spearheading virtual and in-person outreach to share information on vaccines, ranked-choice voting, citizenship eligibility, and immigration policy changes; participating in emergency response efforts for the Afghan + Haitian refugee crises, and advising other city agencies on the development and implementation of policies related to immigrant New Yorkers