The Obama administration and its allies are holding scores of events this week as part of a sweeping new initiative to nudge 8.8 million legal residents who are eligible for naturalization to become full-fledged citizens, and therefore, eligible to vote.
The not-so-secret expectation is that most of them would probably register as Democrats, given the demographics heavy on Hispanics and Asians, a fact that has not been lost on many conservatives.
It turns out that many Republicans consider legal immigration a more immediate and existential threat to the GOP than illegal immigration. While the total number of illegal immigrants is estimated at 11 million, there are more than 13 million permanent legal residents, and that number could grow at a clip of a million a year.
Most of those green card holders are already on a path to becoming citizens and voters, and their politics skew Democratic.
The White House’s “Stand Stronger” initiative, announced last week, aims to remove barriers for permanent residents to apply for full citizenship, including the right to vote. The White House and its partners are planning 70 outreach events in the first week alone, as well as 200 naturalization ceremonies that will induct 36,000 new citizens over the same period. The administration has also lowered other financial barriers to obtaining citizenship, including accepting credit cards to pay the fee, and it’s considering further reducing costs for those who have low incomes but make too much to have the fee waived completely.
More than 30 percent of the green card holders eligible to apply for citizenship are originally from Mexico, according to federal data. Of the top 10 countries of origin, only two, Canada and the United Kingdom, are not in Latin America or Asia.
Conservatives have increasingly been raising the alarm about legal immigration as a more imminent threat to Republican power than any possible pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the U.S.
Just last month, immigration hard-liner Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) called for reducing the number of green cards issued each year, warning that the government is on track to allow 10 million new permanent residents into the country over the next 10 years. While his analysis focused on what he considered the potential negative economic impacts, the political implications were unsubtly telegraphed in the states cited to put the 10 million figure into perspective: The new residents would be larger than populations of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina combined.
Pew polling data shows that Asians and Hispanics tend to support “bigger government providing more services” at significantly higher rates than the general public.
The White House insists the initiative was not focused on elections and was simply part of “Citizenship Day”.
According to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, it takes an average of six months to complete the naturalization process.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
No comments:
Post a Comment