Politico
By Sarah Wheaton
September 21, 2015
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.
“We’re
getting lower-income people who are coming in and taking more services,
and they’re drawn to the Democrats,” said Ed Martin, president of the
right-wing Eagle Forum,
which raised the alarm last year in a report titled “How Mass (Legal)
Immigration Dooms a Conservative Republican Party.” “That’s what Obama
knows, and that’s what the Democrats know, and that’s what Republicans
should know and should be fighting back against
it,” Martin said.
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.”
The
Eagle Forum paper cites Pew polling data showing that Asians and
Hispanics tend to support “bigger government providing more services” at
significantly higher rates
than the general public.
“Republicans
can never turn liberal-leaning immigrants and their adult children into
supporters of limited government faster than the current high level of
legal immigration
(one million a year) is bringing in new liberal voters,” the report
warns.
The White House insists the initiative was not focused on elections and was simply part of “Citizenship Day” on Sept. 17.
The
White House's initiative coincides with a visit to Washington by Pope
Francis, a strong champion of immigrants. The Catholic Church has long
advocated for immigration
reform in the United States, and the pope had even hoped to visit the
U.S.-Mexico border during his trip, though he decided not to for
logistical reasons. Although the Obama administration didn't explicitly
link its plans to Francis, the rollout could take
advantage of the general mood in town during the visit of the highly
popular, Argentine-born pontiff.
“The
idea of raising awareness about the rights, responsibilities and
importance of citizenship is not a partisan idea,” said a White House
spokesperson.
But
it comes as members of the administration — up to President Barack
Obama himself — have been stepping up their critique of Republicans’
anti-immigrant rhetoric. Vice
President Joe Biden denounced what he called Donald Trump’s “sick
message” on immigration, telling a gathering of business leaders last
week that government should be “welcoming, rather than disparaging”
immigrants as sources of economic dynamism.
Trump, for his part, echoed earlier remarks when he said, “We have a lot of really bad dudes in this country from outside.”
Those
remarks will galvanize Hispanics, said Janet Murguía, head of the
National Council of La Raza, a strong backer of the administration’s
efforts on immigration.
“Latinos
are responding against this demonization in the most American of ways:
immigrants who are eligible are becoming citizens,” she wrote in a
recent blog post, “and
those who are citizens are registering to vote.”
According
to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, it takes an
average of six months to complete the naturalization process.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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