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The Immigrant Vote Packs Real Potential
With Hispanic, Asian and immigrant voters increasing, the RNC is
working hard to shed the party’s image as a bastion of white,
conservative America
By Carolina Gonzalez,
NYIC
Traducción al español.
NEW YORK - September 2, 2004 - With the number of Hispanic, Asian and
immigrant voters growing across the United States, those choreographing
the public face of this week’s Republican National Convention are
working hard to shed the party’s image as a bastion of white,
conservative America. For the first time ever, the convention features
daily press briefings in Spanish and Spanish translation of all the
convention proceedings on its website.
Both political parties are reaching out as never before to attract
immigrant voters, especially since so many of them live in states where
the margins of this year’s presidential election are expected to be
close. Immigrants and immigrant organizations welcome the focus on their
potential political power.
Since 9/11, Romeo Garcia of the Pilipino Bayanihan Resource Center in
Daly City, California, has worked to help scores of Pilipino airport
screeners laid off after policy changes made the immigrant workers
ineligible for the work. But getting them new jobs is not enough, said
Garcia. “We realized that one of the keys to addressing our needs is to
increase civic participation.”
That is why the Pilipino Bayanihan Resource Center and scores of
organizations around the country that work with immigrants have this
year turned attention, and a significant portion of their resources, to
getting more immigrants to vote if they are eligible, and be otherwise
involved with election campaigns if they are not. In New York City, the
New York Immigration Coalition is working with a dozen community groups
to educate and mobilize at least 100,000 immigrant voters for the 2004
elections and beyond. T
The NYIC’s New Citizen Voter Registration Project has registered more
than 224,000 new citizens to vote over the past eight years by, among
other things, targeting newly naturalized immigrants at swearing-in
ceremonies, just as they become eligible to vote.
The surge in the number of immigrants applying for citizenship --
between October 2003 and May 2004, almost half a million immigrants
nationally applied for citizenship, 32 percent more than in the same
period the previous year -- has not yet translated into equivalent power
in the voting booth.
“After they [immigrants] become citizens, they are faced with many
institutional barriers that keep them from going to the polls” said
Larisa Casillas, a coordinator of an immigrant voter mobilization
project at the Northern California Citizenship Project in San Francisco.
This year, the NCCP is working with organizations throughout the state
to get more naturalized immigrants registered and to the polls, not just
in this year’s presidential election, but in future municipal and state
elections.
The obstacles to overcome are several. According to Census figures, only
four of every ten foreign-born people in the U.S. are naturalized
citizens. And with a backlog of hundreds of thousands of citizenship
applications -- the average wait is now two years -- even those who want
to cast their vote are unable to. Getting access to informational
material in other languages is hard. It is also sometimes difficult to
bridge some cultural differences.
“A lot of immigrants are wary of anything that has to do with the
government,” said Garcia. “And we also have to deal with a generation
gap. A lot of our outreach workers are young, college-age, and we’re
dealing with a lot of seniors, and we have to be careful to not make it
seem like we’re preaching to our elders.”
But the payoff in the efforts is potentially great. Not only has the
number of immigrants increased dramatically over the last decade, but
also there has been an even greater increase in the population outside
the traditional immigrant centers. In Illinois, the number of immigrants
in Chicago grew by 34 percent between 1990 and 2000, but increased by
86% outside the city.
The five states with the greatest increase in immigrant population since
1990 are North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, Arkansas and Utah. And once
those eligible to vote acquire the habit, they are stalwart in
exercising their civic rights and duties. A report by the National
Council of La Raza found that in the 2000 elections, 87 percent of
registered foreign-born voters went to the polls, a greater proportion
than whites, Blacks or U.S.-born Latinos.
“It’s become very clear to us that if immigrant issues are going to be
taken seriously, we have to speak to politicians in language they
understand, and the language they understand is numbers of voters,” said
Joshua Hoyt of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
in Chicago.
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Carolina Gonzalez is a freelance journalist based in New York
City. The NYIC (New York Immigrant Coalition) authorizes
and encourages the reproduction and reprinting, with permission to alter
for clarity and length, the following article. Please send copies of any
reprints to dncrnc@thenyic.org.
For Spanish-language translations, email
dncrnc@thenyic.org. |
