About to Reap What They Have Sowed — Maybe
The Pew Hispanic Center has shown that naturalized Latinos are more likely to register and to vote than U.S.-born Latinos. Julia Preston of the New York Times reports that recent data suggests that there will be more newly naturalized Latino voters than ever before:
Immigration authorities are swamped in new bureaucratic backlogs resulting from an unanticipated flood last summer of applications for citizenship and for residence visas, officials said.
In July and August alone, the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services agency received 2.5 million applications, including petitions for naturalization as well as for the entire range of immigrant visas. That was more than double the total applications it received in the same two months in 2006, said a spokesman, Bill Wright.
In the 2007 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, the agency received 1.4 million petitions from legal immigrants to become United States citizens, about double the number of naturalization petitions in the 2006 fiscal year, Mr. Wright said.
The surge began after Jan. 31 when the immigration agency announced fee increases averaging 66 percent for most applications, official figures show. The increases went into effect July 30. The contentious tenor of the immigration debate also prompted legal immigrants to apply for citizenship. “We did our absolute best to foresee the surge we would have,” Mr. Wright said. “We certainly were surprised by such an immediate increase with such a volume.”
If any Latino voter is going to hold Republicans responsible for the thinly veiled racism of the immigration debate, it is the newly naturalized. And the newly naturalized vote — if they are allowed. Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post reports on the unprecedented backlog in the processing of applications:
The Department of Homeland Security failed to prepare for a massive influx of applications for U.S. citizenship and other immigration benefits this summer, prompting complaints from Hispanic leaders and voter-mobilization groups that several hundred thousand people likely will not be granted citizenship in time to cast ballots in the 2008 presidential election.
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Before the fee hike, citizenship cases typically took about seven months to complete. Now, immigration officials can take five months or more just to acknowledge receipt of applications from parts of the country and will take 16 to 18 months on average to process applications filed after June 1, according to officials from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of DHS. Such a timeline would push many prospective citizens well past voter-registration deadlines for the 2008 primaries and the general elections.
