UNITED STATES: Wave of New Citizens Seeks Political Voice

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 7 1997 (IPS) - When the Republican-led Congress voted last year to deter illegal immigration by stiffening penalties, placing more guards at the Mexican border, and cutting welfare for even legal immigrants, few expected organised opposition from the immigrants themselves.

One year later, however, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) is swamped with requests from recent immigrants to become citizens, with 1.8 million such applications expected this year alone. And, ironically enough for the Republicans, the newly- naturalised immigrants have a distinct profile: poliically active, concerned about health and education, and often Democratic.

In New York, one of the five major urban centres that are home to 75 percent of the new citizens – the other four are Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Miami – several new immigrant groups have been rallying the recently-naturalised to vote. One of them, the New Americans Democratic Club, launched itself officially last week as an explicit challenge to what it perceives as the anti-immigrant policies of the Republican leadership in Congress.

“We see the great electoral potential in the growing numbers of new Americans in our area,” said the group’s vice president, Arthur Rojas, a resident of the New York borough of Queens who came to this country from Colombia. “We believe the Democratic Party can provide a political home for them, especially given the intolerance and animus towards immigrants from other political forces.”

“Democrats are more involved in immigrant affairs,” agreed Morshed Alam, a Bangladeshi-American and the group’s president. But he added that on a wider range of issues, from education concerns to health and welfare, most new citizens find themselves closer politically to the Democrats than to the more rightist Republicans.

Alam told IPS that his group has just started, but already has begun to organise voters among communities throughout New York, ranging from South Asians and Chinese to Latin Americans and even Puerto Ricans – who, as citizens of a U.S. colony, are not immigrants but have also felt affected by the recent backlash.

If all those groups can be made to turn out for the Democrats, it could be a significant blow to the Republican Party, which has staked some of its electoral fortunes in 1994 and 1996 on playing to nativist sentiments.

The party’s leadership strongly backed measures to deny education and health services to illegal immigrant families in California’s ballot proposition 187, passed overwhelmingly in 1994; it also pushed for greater INS and border patrol funding in last September’s immigration reforms.

Roseann Micallef, executive director of the New York-based Centre for Immigrant Rights, said that the new voters would likely mobilise against any further anti-immigrant measures, such as welfare cuts, which she said “balanced the budget on the backs of immigrants.”

Micallef argued that political mobilisation among the immigrant communities is just beginning. There is a wave of “much stronger interest in political issues” since last year’s measures were passed, she said. As a result, the immigration attorney added, since “poor, working-class people tend to vote among Democratic lines,” the centrist party may stand to gain in several key urban centres from the new organising impetus.

Officials, however, have not noticed any dramatic change in the increase of naturalisations since 1992, when the numbers of applications for citizenship first began to rise, said Rob Koon, an INS spokesman. Since 300,000 immigrants applied for citizenship that year, he said, the rate of applications has often doubled with every year. Last year, more than 1.2 million people applied for citizenship, a number which is projected to increase by 50 percent by the end of this year, Koon added.

That steady rise may have many factors, the INS spokesman said, including a 1989 decision to require holders of ‘green card’ residency permits to renew their permission to reside and work in the United States every ten years. After the limit was first imposed, Koon said, many immigrants who had held on to foreign citizenship may have found it worthwhile to pay 95 dollars once to apply for naturalisation rather than to pay green card renewal fees every decade.

However, he added, last year’s immigration and welfare restrictions may also have “persuaded people who were sitting on the fence that it’s time to get naturalised.”

So far, few politicians seem worried about any new alignments that the sudden surge in potential voters, might have. Cities like New York and Los Angeles are already heavily Democratic, while Miami’s main immigrant community, the Cuban-Americans, have long been politically powerful and strongly Republican. Micallef acknowledged that some immigrant influxes – most notably those of the Cubans and the South-east Asians – have actually bucked the trend by being politically conservative.

New York’s Republican mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, is unworried. Giuliani stood apart from his party last year in attacking the immigration legislation, and has pleaded this year for the federal government to restore at least some of the money it cut in welfare assistance to legal immigrants. This week, President Bill Clinton and the Congress agreed in a budget deal to restore federal disability funds to immigrants, one of the most provocative cuts in the welfare overhaul that was approved last year.

“Giuliani has been great on this,” said Dan Kesselbrenner, director of the National Lawyers Guild’s immigration project. The mayor, he said, knew that trying to cut all forms of assistance to immigrants “is not an acceptable position to take in New York.” As a result, Micallef agreed, Giuliani likely will not have to worry about political opposition from new citizens when he runs for re-election this November – although, she added, other politicians in his party may not be similarly immune in coming years.