Thread: More Latinos Seek Citizenship to Vote Against Trump

More Latinos Seek Citizenship to Vote Against Trump


By JULIA PRESTON
MARCH 7, 2016


Study materials were handed out during a naturalization workshop in Denver to help legal residents
become citizens. Credit Theo Stroomer for The New York Times

DENVER — Donald J. Trump’s harsh campaign language against Mexican immigrants has helped him win a substantial delegate lead in the Republican primaries, but it is also mobilizing a different set of likely voters — six in the family of Hortensia Villegas alone.

A legal immigrant from Mexico, Ms. Villegas is a mother of two who has been living in the United States for nearly a decade but never felt compelled to become a citizen. But as Mr. Trump has surged toward the Republican nomination, Ms. Villegas — along with her sister, her parents and her husband’s parents — has joined a rush by many Latino immigrants to naturalize in time to vote in November.

“I want to vote so Donald Trump won’t win,” said Ms. Villegas, 32, one of several hundred legal residents, mostly Mexicans, who crowded one recent Saturday into a Denver union hall. Volunteers helped them fill out applications for citizenship, which this year are taking about five months for federal officials to approve.

“He doesn’t like us,” she said.



Hortensia Villegas, center, with her husband, Miguel Garfío, her children,
and her sister Silvia, outside a naturalization workshop in Denver.
“I want to vote so Donald Trump won’t win,” said Ms. Villegas.
Credit Theo Stroomer for The New York Times

Over all, naturalization applications increased by 11 percent in the 2015 fiscal year over the year before, and jumped 14 percent during the six months ending in January, according to federal figures. The pace is picking up by the week, advocates say, and they estimate applications could approach one million in 2016, about 200,000 more than the
average in recent years.

While naturalizations generally rise during presidential election years, Mr. Trump provided an extra boost this year.

He began his campaign in June describing Mexicans as drug-traffickers and rapists. His pledge to build a border wall

and make Mexico pay for it has been a regular applause line. He has vowed to create a deportation force to expel the estimated 11 million immigrants here illegally, evoking mass roundups of the 1950s.

Among 8.8 million legal residents eligible to naturalize, about 2.7 million are Mexicans, the largest national group, federal figures show. But after decades of low naturalization rates, only 36 percent of eligible Mexicans have become citizens, while 68 percent of all other immigrants have done so, according to the Pew Research Center.

“A lot of people are opening their eyes because of all the negative stuff Donald Trump has brought,” said Ms. Villegas’s husband, Miguel Garfío, 30, who was born and raised in Colorado and came to the workshop here to help his wife and other family members become citizens.

His parents came from Mexico in the 1980s and worked hard all their lives, he said, helping him create a construction company in Denver that now employs 18 people. Contrary to Mr. Trump’s depiction, he said, none of his relatives have criminal records.


The naturalization workshop drew a large crowd on Feb. 27, as immigrants rushed to
naturalize in time to vote in November. Credit Theo Stroomer for The New York Times

This year immigrants seeking to become citizens can find extra help from nonprofit groups and even from the White House.

Last September, President Obama opened a national campaign to galvanize legal residents to take the step. They can now pay the fee, $680, with a credit card, and practice the civics test online. They can get applications at “citizenship corners” in public libraries in many states.

The White House recruited Fernando Valenzuela, the legendary Mexican-born pitcher who naturalized only last year, and José Andrés, the Spanish-American chef, to make encouraging advertisements and to turn up at swearing-in ceremonies.

On Presidents’ Day, administration officials swore in more than 20,000 new citizens. On Wednesday the administration announced $10 million in grants to groups guiding immigrants through the process.

A majority of Latinos are Democrats, and some Republicans accuse the White House of leading a thinly veiled effort to expand the ranks of the president’s party. But administration officials argue the campaign is nonpartisan, noting that immigrants who become citizens improve their incomes and chances for homeownership.

“I certainly don’t care what party they register with; I just want them to become citizens,” said Leon Rodriguez, director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency in charge of naturalizations.

Aside from Colorado, naturalization drives are taking place in Nevada and Florida, states likely to be fiercely contested in November where Latino voters could provide a crucial margin. One nonprofit group, the New Americans Campaign, plans to complete 1,500 applications at a session in the Marlins Park baseball stadium in Miami on March 19.

Among the groups the White House is supporting are immigrant rights organizations and labor unions, which say their goal in holding dozens of citizenship workshops this spring is to build immigrant voting power. They want to bolster support for legislation creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, which Mr. Obama has long promised but has never
been able to push through Congress. Recently naturalized immigrants, after all the effort they must make, are more likely to vote than longtime citizens.

“People who are eligible are really feeling the urgency to get out there,” said Tara Raghuveer, deputy director of the National Partnership for New Americans, a coalition that helped put on the workshop in Denver. “They are worried by the prospect that someone who is running for president has said hateful things.”

Mr. Trump says he is confident Latinos will support him, because he has employed many thousands of them over the years. “I’m just telling you that I will do really well with Hispanics,” he said in the Republican debate in Houston on Feb. 26.

But in a poll of Latino voters on Feb. 25 by The Washington Post and Univision, the Spanish language television network, 80 percent had an unfavorable view of Mr. Trump, including 72 percent with a very unfavorable view, far more than for other Republican candidates.

Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said, “No one will benefit more from Mr. Trump’s pro-worker immigration reforms than the millions of immigrants who already call America home.” She said his proposals include “limiting the ability of corporations to replace them with new, lower-wage workers brought in from abroad.” Polls show Hispanic workers favor raising wages instead of importing foreigners, Ms. Hicks said, adding, “That is the core moral principle that will guide immigration policy in a Trump administration.”

Many Mexicans have been content to live in the United States with their resident green cards. The naturalization fee is high, and Mexicans often underestimate their English and worry they will fail the test, said Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California who studies citizenship. Many Mexicans have family members who are undocumented, and think twice before engaging with the government, he said.

Yet many Mexicans joined a naturalization rush in 2007, when the threat of a fee increase right before the 2008 election prompted more than 1.3 million immigrants to apply. This year, no such increase looms. There is no hard deadline for immigrants hoping to vote in November, but with the agency currently approving naturalizations in about five months, immigrant groups are pressing to get applications in before May 1 to allow new citizens time to register to vote.

At the Denver workshop, many aspiring voters agreed on why they are naturalizing this year.

“Donald Trump never! Never!” said Minerva Guerrero Salazar, 40, who has been working for a uniform rental company since moving here from Mexico in 2002. “He has no conscience when he speaks of Latinos. And he is so rude. I don’t know what kind of education his mother gave him.”

Several women said they hoped to vote for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner.

At least one man liked a Republican. Dr. Oscar Argüello Rudín, 71, a Costa Rican who has been a resident since 1971 and recentlyretired as chief of surgery at a hospital in Colorado Springs, favored Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.

Mary Victorio, 22, a Mexican-born student at the University of Colorado Denver, said she would vote Democratic but was grateful in one way to Mr. Trump. “He gave us that extra push we needed to get ready to vote, to prove to people who see us negatively they
are wrong,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on March 8, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

To Block Trump, Latinos to Seek First Vote in U.S.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/us...-him.html?_r=0

A legal immigrant from Mexico, Ms. Villegas is a mother of two who has been living in the United States
for nearly a decade but never felt compelled to become a citizen.

Among 8.8 million legal residents eligible to naturalize, about 2.7 million are Mexicans, the largest national group, federal figures show. But after decades of low naturalization rates, only 36 percent of eligible Mexicans have become citizens, while 68 percent of all other immigrants have done so, according to the Pew Research Center.

Fealty to Mexico? Never participated or made an effort until the gravy train is threatened... Just an impression.

These people identify as Mexicans not as Americans. Mexican is not a race it is a nationality and it sounds as though they have been happy being Mexicans living here for the benefits rather than making an effort to become Americans. Now, they want to engage in politics to keep the borders open to more of their countrymen. JMO

More evidence that illegal aliens are here in America to help socialists gain permanent dominance in US elections.

W

Our tax dollars at work.......

Obama Admin Funds Blitz To Naturalize Anti-Trump Voters

Chuck Ross
03/28/2016



The Obama administration is supporting several non-profit groups — with federal funding through a major White House initiative — that are part of an organized effort aimed at converting green-card holders into U.S. citizens in order to vote against Donald Trump, a Daily Caller investigation reveals.


Through an initiative called Networks for Integrating New Americans initiative, which the White House formed in April 2014, the administration has partnered with the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA), an immigration rights umbrella organization that has denounced Trump’s “hateful rhetoric.”


In a recent post to its Facebook page, NPNA asserted that green-card holders “have the potential to change America’s electorate” by gaining citizenship. The group and its executive director is also affiliated with one of the leftist groups that helped shut down a Trump rally in Chicago earlier this month.



And through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Obama administration has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to groups that have cited Trump as one reason that green-card holders should obtain citizenship before the general election in November.

The findings raise questions over whether groups that receive federal funds should be allowed to openly target specific presidential candidates. They also suggest what many conservative critics of immigration reform have long asserted: that one of the goals of activist citizenship groups is to create a new batch of Democratic voters.

Trump has become a target for Latino and immigrant rights groups for his comments about illegal aliens and his promises to build a “big, beautiful wall” along the southern border.


The revolt against a potential Trump nomination has been dubbed the “Trump Effect.” CNN recently reported that the number of naturalization applications increased 14.5 percent in June-December 2015 compared to the same period in 2014.

That jump is thanks in part to activist groups’ efforts to convince many of the 4.5 million Latino residents in the U.S. eligible for naturalization to apply for it.

The federal government isn’t alone in leveraging Trump in order to boost citizenship applications. Numerous entities — including the Mexican government and billionaire George Soros — have funded community activist groups pushing permanent legal residents to obtain citizenship so that they can vote against the GOP front-runner.

Earlier this month Bloomberg Politics reported that the Mexican government is hosting citizenship drives at its consulates in several major U.S. cities. One presumptive goal of the effort is to put permanent residents on the path to citizenship in order to vote against Trump.

And Soros, through his Open Society Foundations network, is funding numerous organizations that oppose Trump and support amnesty and other pro-immigrant reforms.

Several of those groups were involved in protests that led to the cancellation of a Trump rally in Chicago earlier this month. One of those is the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), a Chicago-based outfit that is closely affiliated with National Partnership for New Americans, the group involved in the Obama White House’s citizenship enrollment task force.

As part of the task force, NPNA operates under the direction of World Education, Inc., a Boston-based social and economic development group. The initiative is being funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education.

ICIRR is part of NPNA’s network, and the two groups have worked together on the citizenship application push. Part of their effort involves guiding green-card holders through the naturalization process. And in some cases, they help applicants apply for waivers to avoid having to pay the $680 naturalization application fee.

The two non-profits are also connected through NPNA’s executive director, Joshua Hoyt. He previously served as executive director at ICIRR.

The White House-backed NPNA makes its anti-Trump bent no secret.

Tara Raghuveer, the group’s deputy executive director, recently cited Trump’s “hateful” rhetoric as a spark for the naturalization application push.

“People who are eligible are really feeling the urgency to get out there,” Raghuveer told The New York Times. “They are worried by the prospect that someone who is running for president has said hateful things.”

In a post on its Facebook page, NPNA asserted that one “silver lining to all the hateful rhetoric spewing from the presidential campaign” is that naturalization rates have jumped and “could approach 1 million this year.”

NPNA’s Facebook page is also littered with anti-Trump rhetoric and links to articles criticizing the candidate. It frequently uses the hashtags “#StandUpToHate” and “#NaturalizeNow” as part of its campaign.

The Obama administration is also backing anti-Trump groups through a $10 million U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) citizenship and integration grant program.

The Chicago-based Instituto del Progresso Latino and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, which is based in Los Angeles, both received $250,000 in fiscal year 2015 as part of the program, which aims to help permanent residents apply for and obtain citizenship.

Earlier this month, the Chicago branch of Asian Americans Advancing Justice hosted an event “to denounce the hateful rhetoric against Muslims, immigrants, and others by Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.”

Representatives with Instituto del Progresso Latino and the Chicago branch of the Council on Americans-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group with known ties to terrorists, also attended the event. As did Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a Democrat who is one of the House’s most vocal supporters of amnesty.

Earlier this month Gutierrez joined Hillary Clinton at an event hosted by another Chicago community organizer called The Resurrection Project in which he called for 1 million legal permanent residents to obtain citizenship in order to “stop the hate” and defeat Trump. (RELATED: Congressman Calls On 1 Million Immigrants To Obtain Citizenship In Order To Stop Trump)

The effort — which Clinton praised — involved the use of “navigators” to guide applicants through the process of obtaining citizenship.

“I am in support of what you are doing to try to help navigate people who are here, who are already permanent residents eligible for citizenship to take the next steps to become citizens,” Clinton said.

“We especially need you now because I know people are worried and they’re afraid by some of what they are hearing,” she continued.

The Resurrection Project has also received federal funding, though it appears not to be related to the citizenship effort. Last August the group received a $36,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It was given a $36,850 grant the year before.

Another group with anti-Trump sentiments that is involved in the citizenship push is Catholic Legal Services of Miami. Through the USCIS program, it has partnered with the School Board of Miami-Dade County on its “Fast Track to Citizenship” program, which focuses on guiding Cuban, Haitian, Dominican and Colombian residents through the citizenship application process.

In another article published earlier this month about the “Trump Effect,” Catholic Legal Services director Raul Hernandez said he supported residents rationale for obtaining citizenship and heralded a mass push as a “game changer.”

“If that is the motivation for them to become citizens, I welcome the motivation,” he told CNN.

“It’s going to be a totally different political situation — folks with a different view of what a citizen is, raising their voice, saying, ‘I’m here and I want to have a say in the future of the nation.'”

http://dailycaller.com/2016/03/28/ob...#ixzz44ISaWlE6

Is the Obama administration bending the rules to to get them on the roles faster? Or, do they have to follow the same rules that all of the previous legal immigrants have had to follow and pay the same fees?