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  1. #1
    Senior Member zeezil's Avatar
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    Citizenship surges for Mexican immigrants

    Citizenship surges for Mexican immigrants as total naturalizations dip
    Chicago area gained 37,700 naturalized Americans in 2007
    By Antonio Olivo | Chicago Tribune reporter
    July 11, 2008

    Reflecting a massive push for citizenship in Chicago and other cities with large Latino populations, the number of Mexican immigrants naturalized in 2007 jumped 46 percent from a year earlier to 122,250, federal statistics released Wednesday show.

    That is significant considering overall new citizenship in 2007 dropped slightly during the same period by 0.06 percent, to 660,480 Americans.

    In the Chicago area, a 30 percent spike in new citizens in 2007—to 37,700—coincides with national efforts to register half a million immigrant voters in time for the November presidential elections.

    That campaign, known as the We Are America Alliance, has been fueled locally by an immigrant-rights movement that orchestrated several massive marches through the Loop in recent years, reaching 400,000 demonstrators in May 2006.

    Since those marches, organizations such as the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights have held citizenship workshops throughout the region, with their staffs attending U.S. naturalization ceremonies with voter-registration forms in hand.

    "If they're naturalized, we want to make sure they're also registered [to vote]," said Flavia Jimenez, who has helped coordinate the coalition's New Americans Initiative.

    In large metropolitan areas across the country, Mexicans made up the largest number of new citizens in 2007, representing as many as half of all naturalizations in some areas, according to the federal Department of Homeland Security data. Department officials did not provide country-specific figures for individual areas.

    Immigrants from nearly every other country showed slight decreases in citizenship from 2006 to 2007, though El Salvadorans and Guatemalans increased respectively by 27 percent and 25 percent, figures show.

    Indian immigrants had the second-highest number of new citizens last year, with 46,870. Immigrants from the Philippines were third, with 38,830 naturalizations.
    http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... 7053.story
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  2. #2
    Senior Member zeezil's Avatar
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    Citizenship numbers surge in state
    MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS LEAD WAY IN TAKING OATH
    By Mike Swift
    Mercury News
    Article Launched: 07/11/2008 01:33:19 AM PDT

    Long a port of entry for immigrants, California has bolstered its position as a portal to citizenship, and as the center of a national surge in citizenship among Mexican immigrants.

    According to a new report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the number of new citizens in California rose by 19 percent, with 181,684 residents taking the oath of citizenship last year - the most since 2001 and more than twice as many as any other state.

    Nationally, the number of Mexican immigrants who became citizens jumped by 46 percent, to 122,258 people from fiscal 2006 to fiscal 2007. Mexicans made up one-third to one-half of new citizens in California, Texas and Illinois, and in metro areas such as Houston and San Diego.

    The Bay Area ranked behind behind only metropolitan New York and Los Angeles in the total number of new citizens. Metro San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont ranked fifth and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara came in 11th among individual U.S. metropolitan statistical areas.

    Immigration experts said the wave of newly minted Mexican-born U.S. citizens is likely the result of many factors, including the immigration-reform protest marches of 2006. Other cited reasons: local and national citizenship drives, a rush to avoid citizenship application fee increases, fear about an anti-immigrant backlash and the desire to vote in the 2008 elections. Demographers also note that California's immigrants have lived longer in the United States.

    "All these factors kind of combine and they make naturalization a socially acceptable goal," said Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute in Los Angeles, a think tank that studies Latino issues. "It's become the community norm."

    At least locally, the surge in naturalization appears likely to continue, if only because of the huge backlog of unprocessed citizenship applications.

    Even though the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services plans to naturalize about 10,000 people in San Jose in August - nearly as many as in all of fiscal 2007 - and has hired seven new workers to process citizenship applications, there is still a 14-month wait for application processing.

    "What we are expecting is that wait times will decrease," said Sharon Rummery, a spokeswoman for the government agency. "That's what we're hoping for."

    In a factor that could play into the 2008 presidential race, there was also a surge of new citizens in Western swing states, including Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado.

    Several Latino civil rights organizations have been working nationally to encourage more Latinos, particularly recent immigrants, to become citizens. The campaign is designed to encourage new citizens to vote for immigrant-friendly candidates, who will push for changes such as a pathway to citizenship for those here illegally.

    In Nevada, for example, the 8,363 immigrants who naturalized in 2007 was double the total of just five years earlier. Whether those new citizens help either presidential candidate depends on whether people register and then actually vote in November.

    Janet Murguia, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino civil rights group, said Thursday that the naturalization numbers show her group's efforts are beginning to pay off.

    "The failure to get comprehensive immigration reform," she said, "is mobilizing Latinos."
    http://www.mercurynews.com/valley/ci_98 ... ck_check=1
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  3. #3
    Senior Member zeezil's Avatar
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    Number of Mexicans gaining citizenship soars in 2007
    The figure rise nearly 50% from the year before, a federal report says. Officials cite a campaign by Spanish-language media and community groups, plus a desire to apply before a fee hike kicked in.
    By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
    July 11, 2008
    » Discuss Article (38 Comments)

    The number of Mexican-born immigrants who became U.S. citizens swelled by nearly 50% last year amid a massive campaign by Spanish-language media and immigrant advocacy groups to help eligible residents apply for citizenship, according to a government report released Thursday.

    Despite Mexicans' historically low rates of naturalization, 122,000 attained citizenship in 2007, up from 84,000 the previous year, with California and Texas posting the largest gains. Salvadorans and Guatemalans also showed significant increases at a time when the overall number of naturalizations declined by 6%.

    At the same time, the number of citizenship applications filed doubled to 1.4 million last year, the report by the U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics found.

    The surge in naturalization of Mexicans, their largest year-to-year increase this decade, came amid pitched national debate over immigration reform. The report cited the campaign by Spanish-language media and community groups, along with a desire to apply before steep fee increases took effect, as two major reasons for the jump in naturalizations.

    "Immigrants are tired of the tone and tenor of the immigration debate, which they feel is humiliating and does not recognize their contributions," said Rosalind Gold of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials' Educational Fund in Los Angeles. "That climate has fueled their desire to have their voices heard."

    New citizens interviewed Thursday echoed those sentiments. Erika Lorena Rivera, 30, came to Los Angeles from Mexico at age 1, became eligible for naturalization a decade ago but decided to take the plunge -- along with four relatives -- just last October. Rivera, a supervisor for a Los Angeles hair accessory firm, said she was offended by what she perceived as growing anti-immigrant bias and was moved to apply for citizenship after seeing ads about it on TV.

    "I became a citizen to have full rights and vote for a president for the first time," said Rivera, adding that she and her family plan to vote for Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

    The increase in Latinos with the power to vote could affect the political landscape in November, analysts said. Louis DiSipio, a UC Irvine political science professor, said one of the biggest impacts could be in Florida, a key battleground state that posted 54,500 new citizens last year. Although the ethnic Cuban population there has dominated the Latino political landscape and tended to vote Republican, he said, more of the newer immigrants are coming from South America and trending Democratic. For the first time this decade, more Latinos were registered as Democrats than Republicans, 35% to 33% as of this spring, according to Gold.

    Beyond November, the swelling Latino numbers nationwide will continue to recast the political landscape for local elections, DiSipio said. He said that growing Latino naturalizations in the late 1990s, thanks to a 1986 amnesty for illegal immigrants, helped California Democrats gain an 800,000-plus voter edge and that similar gains could occur with the newest increase.

    Gold said that new Latino citizens have higher voting rates than longtime Mexican Americans and that their political allegiances are shallower. As a result, she said, their votes are still up for grabs for those elected officials willing to work hard to reach them. In addition, she said, the proportion of Latino voters identifying themselves as independents is growing.

    Erica L. Bernal-Martinez, senior director of civic engagement for the association of Latino officials, said grass-roots organizations planned to continue their push to encourage naturalizations among the estimated 4 million to 5 million eligible Latinos. Mexicans have historically had low rates of naturalization -- 35% compared with 59% for all immigrants -- but that appears to be changing as media and community organizations pour unprecedented resources and energy into their civic engagement campaigns, Bernal-Martinez and Gold said.

    More than 400 community organizations across the country, along with major Spanish-language media, have joined forces in a "Ya Es Hora" (It's Time) campaign to help eligible voters become citizens and register to vote. The campaign plans to hold naturalization workshops in 10 cities Saturday.

    "We think with this type of promotion and outreach, we can really rewrite this story of Latino naturalizations," Gold said.

    However, steep fee increases last July sharply reduced the overall monthly number of new applicants from August to December. Applications peaked at 457,000 in July, then plummeted to a monthly average of about 30,000 after the application fee increased to $675 from $400.

    The new report found that California posted the largest gains in new citizens in 2007, from 153,000 the year before to 182,000; followed by Texas, from 38,000 to 53,000; and Illinois, from 30,000 to 39,000.

    After Mexico, the largest number of new citizens came from India, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, South Korea and El Salvador.

    The overall decrease in the number of naturalizations last year occurred after special congressional funding to process the backlog of citizenship applications ran out. But applications continued to soar in the Latino community because of the targeted citizenship campaigns, experts said.

    Jorge-Mario Cabrera, an El Salvador native and Long Beach community activist, finally naturalized last year with his mother; he had been eligible since 1992. He said he had not become a citizen sooner because he wasn't sure why it would matter and he still clung to his allegiances to his native land.

    That changed a few years ago when the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would have criminalized illegal immigrants and those who aided them. Millions of immigrants and supporters poured into the streets to protest, and community organizations mobilized to urge people like Cabrera to naturalize, register to vote and make their voices heard.

    Cabrera, 39, and his 73-year-old mother took the plunge.

    "We felt there were millions of voices left unheard every year, so we decided our two votes were needed to make a difference," he said.
    http://www.latimes.com/news/printeditio ... 1908.story
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