El Salvador's ambassador appealed yesterday to immigrants with special temporary work permits to renew them before a March 8 deadline, saying tens of thousands of Salvadorans still had not done so.
Rene Leon, the ambassador, said in a telephone news conference that as many as 240,000 immigrants could benefit from a recently announced 18-month extension to the Temporary Protected Status program for Salvadorans. The U.S. government program grants residence and work permits to Salvadorans who were in this country when a pair of earthquakes devastated their homeland in 2001 and made it difficult for them to return.
The benefit has been important to El Salvador, which received about $1 billion last year from immigrants with the permits -- roughly 40 percent of the nation's remittances.
Leon said U.S. immigration officials told him that they had received 172,000 applications for the re-registration and expected to hit 200,000 by month's end. He said Salvadoran officials were keeping their U.S. consulates open every day to help immigrants fill out their forms.
"You have until the eighth of March. Don't put off your renewal," Leon urged in his message to immigrants.
The Salvadoran government has launched a broad campaign with groups that assist immigrants to spread the word about the impending deadline and help people fill out renewal forms. The country's president, Tony Saca, kicked off the campaign in early January at an event at a Silver Spring church and will appear this weekend in Long Island, N.Y., to promote the immigration benefit, known as TPS.
"This is going at a good rhythm," Leon said. However, he added, authorities were intensifying their efforts to reach those who hadn't yet re-registered.
Leon said he didn't know how many people locally had applied for the extension. Salvadorans are the largest immigrant group in the Washington area, with nearly 105,000 counted in the 2000 Census. The embassy believes the figure is now far higher.
The extension is the third granted since the program was opened to Salvadorans in March 2001.
