New York Times
By Jackie Calmes
March 30, 2014
AURORA,
Colo. — As the weather warms, Lizeth Chacon is anticipating a new
season of registering Latino voters — yet dreading experiences like one
late last year, when
she came upon a skate park full of older teenagers.
“I
thought, ‘The perfect age! They’re turning 18,’ ” said Ms. Chacon, just
26 herself, born in Mexico and now the lead organizer at Rights for All
People, a local immigrant
organizing group. But among the roughly 50 people she approached in
this increasingly diverse city east of Denver, “not a single person” was
interested in her pitch, including those already old enough to vote:
“They were like, ‘Why? Why would I bother to vote?’
”
Across
the country, immigrant-rights advocates report mounting disillusionment
with both parties among Latinos, enough to threaten recent gains in
voting participation
that have reshaped politics to Democrats’ advantage nationally, and in
states like Colorado with significant Latino populations. High hopes —
kindled by President Obama’s elections and stoked in June by Senate
passage of the most significant overhaul of immigration
law in a generation, with a path to citizenship for about 11 million
people here unlawfully — have been all but dashed.
Latinos
mainly blame Republicans, who control the House and have buried the
Senate bill, but they also have soured on Mr. Obama. The federal
government has so aggressively
enforced existing immigration laws that one national Hispanic leader
recently nicknamed the president “deporter in chief” for allowing nearly
two million people to be deported.
A
day after that widely reported gibe in Washington, at Denver’s
Spanish-language radio station KBNO (“Que Bueno” to its audience), the
host Fernando Sergio devoted his
three-hour talk show to asking listeners whether they agreed with the
criticism, or “has President Obama done the best he can against
Republican opposition?”
“The
majority were very angry at the president,” Mr. Sergio said in an
interview at the station, where pictures of John and Robert Kennedy,
Bill Clinton and Mr. Obama
hang on the walls. “People feel like he’s made some promises that he
hasn’t fulfilled, that he can do more” — like expand his 2012 order that
deferred deportations of young people brought to the country as children, a group known as Dreamers.
“If I were a Democratic consultant,” Mr. Sergio added, “I would have been concerned.”
Democrats
indeed are worried. While the growing Latino electorate is a force in
presidential elections, and one expected to give Democrats an edge for
years unless Republicans
shed an anti-immigrant image, Latinos are relative bit players in this
midterm election year. Their turnout typically drops in midterm years;
nationally and in Colorado, about half of registered Latinos voted in
2008 and 2012, but less than a third did in
the 2010 midterm elections and many Democrats lost. This fall, with
many Latinos caught between hostility toward Republicans and
disappointment with Mr. Obama, participation could dip further.
“There’s
a sense from some people that there’s nowhere to turn, and I’m afraid
they’re just going to be frozen in frustration,” said Lisa Duran,
executive director of
Rights for All People, and Ms. Chacon’s supervisor. “It’s absolutely
imperative that we not let that happen.”
A
depressed vote threatens Democrats in a number of races, notably in
Colorado, where Latinos were 14 percent of the state’s 2012 electorate
and about 70 percent voted
for Democrats. Their Senate majority at risk, Democrats are hustling to
help Senator Mark Udall now that a formidable Republican,
Representative Cory Gardner, has challenged him. They also hope to
snatch the House district, including Aurora, from Representative
Mike Coffman, a Republican. His Democratic rival is Andrew Romanoff, a
former State House speaker.
While
Mr. Coffman lately has moderated his stance on immigration, Mr. Gardner
has not. He has opposed the deportation stay for young people and
objects to the Senate’s
path to citizenship as amnesty, and Democrats plan to emphasize that to
Latino voters.
Hispanics
have typically had lower rates of voter turnout than whites and blacks,
and frustration with Republicans and President Obama alike could cause
rates to dip even
further in this fall’s midterm elections.
“This
is a turnout election for Democrats, and we’re shifting focus and
resources because we know that,” said Senator Michael Bennet of
Colorado, chairman of the Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee. “We can’t outcompete the billionaires on
the airwaves. It’s going to have to be a ground game.” Mr. Bennet won
in 2010 by mobilizing more Latinos, women and young voters than many in
either party predicted.
Discouraged
Democrats take some comfort that the closest Senate races are mostly in
states without many Latinos. As for the House, a couple of dozen races
could turn on
Latino votes — including in California, Florida, Nevada and Texas — but
Republicans are expected to retain their majority.
Still,
Mr. Obama wants to reconcile with Latinos, a group that gave him 71
percent of its votes in 2012. He recently met with several Hispanic
lawmakers and days later
with 17 leaders of immigration groups, but the meetings only
underscored each side’s frustration with the other.
In
the meeting with the immigration groups, Mr. Obama did most of the
talking for nearly two hours, participants said. He argued that by being
united, they had they won
public support for immigration changes, passed the Senate bill and put
House Republicans on the defensive. By now attacking him, the president
said — and he chided Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of
La Raza, for her “deporter in chief” taunt
— the activists were relieving the pressure on Republicans, he said.
Privately, Republicans agree.
The
president told them that his secretary of homeland security, Jeh
Johnson, would review the deportation system. But Mr. Obama lowered
expectations by reiterating that
administration lawyers say he cannot take action beyond his 2012 order
benefiting the so-called Dreamers. The advocates expressed skepticism.
The
exchange reflected Mr. Obama’s bind: If he suspends more deportations,
he could mend relations with Latinos and perhaps motivate more of them
to vote. But he could
lose what chance remains for new immigration law, his second-term
domestic priority, since House Republicans have signaled they would cite
such executive action as proof that he cannot be trusted to enforce any
law.
Back
in Colorado, Leticia Zavala follows the Washington maneuvering from the
vast eastern plains, in the ranching center of Fort Morgan where she
was born, in what is
now Mr. Gardner’s House district. The county is one-third Latino, and
her experiences there capture the community’s conflicted feelings.
Ms.
Zavala, 26, recently was packing to drive to Mexico with her two young
children for their first visit with her husband since he was deported in
December, more than
two years after he was snared in an immigration raid at a dairy plant,
and six years after he began seeking legal status. While she knows
perhaps 10 people who have been deported, until her husband’s ordeal, “I
didn’t really know how it affected families,”
she said, wiping tears.
Yet
she has become more politically active, not less. Ms. Zavala takes
heart from Latinos’ legislative victories in Colorado. She formed a
small immigrants assistance
group, enrolled in community college, and helps a local lawyer with citizenship classes. Everywhere, she carries a backpack with voter
registration forms, envelopes and stamps.
Ms.
Zavala estimated that she has helped register about 100 people, though
it has not been easy. “Many people are angry and upset because Obama
promised so much and it’s
been how many years?” she said. “But the Republicans aren’t doing
anything. We have something; there’s a bill. And for us to sit here in
March 2014 with nothing — people are just really upset.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment