About 1 million legal immigrants are expected to try to naturalize and register to vote this year in an attempt to defeat presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, according to an array of liberal activists organizing a voter registration drive in battleground states.
“There is something unique and significant happening in the immigrant community, and I think more broadly in the Latino community,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., said on a conference call with reporters Wednesday morning. “There is really a hunger for citizenship, and it’s driven by the desire to participate in this year’s presidential election, and particularly this presidential election.”
U.S. Customs and Immigration Services is working to expedite the naturalization process, in part by providing fee waivers to lower-income immigrants, but the new voters’ influence on the 2016 campaign could be far less than the naturalizations goal suggests. It will take five months for the applications to be processed, meaning that most of the applications this year will be too late for the November campaign.
Still, the drive suggests that Trump’s candidacy could have enduring benefits for Democrats who work to rally immigrant voters, beyond this election cycle.
National Partnership for New Americans, an umbrella organization that includes an array of immigrant rights groups as well as traditional Democratic mainstays such as the Service Employees International Union, wants the number of naturalization applications to increase from the traditional figure of about 650,000 to a million.
In March and April, they helped 12,781 legal permanent residents apply for naturalization, according to executive director Joshua Hoyt.
That’s a small fraction of the 500,000 people they have contacted, as reporters noted, but Hoyt explained the disparity by explaining that “many immigrants” apply independently of his group. “We also then worked on workshops to make sure that the people who are closest to our respective organizations had hands-on assistance; it’s not an easy process,” Hoyt said.
The preexisting relationships increase the likelihood that the newly naturalized voters will back Democrats. Gutierrez and Hoyt noted that the naturalization drive is technically “nonpartisan,” but they made clear that it could harm Republicans at the ballot box.
“The events that these organizations are holding are legitimately nonpartisan events, but there is something going on here and the way Donald Trump and other Republicans have been talking about immigrants and refugees — and Latinos and Asians and Muslims — is frankly scaring people into coming forward and becoming citizens,” the Illinois Democrat said.
The activists are targeting long-time legal residents as well young people who can vote for the first time. “We need to go to the graduating classes across the country and make sure we sign those 18-year-olds up to vote,” Gutierrez said.
