Elections & Voting
The growth in the immigrant population has helped to strengthen and remake America over the last two decades. Today, as thousands of baby boomers retire each day, working-age immigrants are filling gaps in the labor market, paying billions of dollars in taxes that help our entitlement programs survive, and buying homes in communities that would otherwise be in decline. Millions of immigrants have also earned U.S. citizenship and the right to vote while millions more are estimated to be eligible to naturalize.
Setting the Stage for Immigration Reform
As people head to the polls tomorrow, they will consider a wide range of important issues—the economy, health care, unemployment, deficit spending, tax cuts and immigration to name a few. Not all voters are single issue voters, nor will people vote strictly down party or demographic lines. But whomever people vote for, it is critically important that they consider their issues not only as a reflection of where we are now, but where we want to be down the road, using present day indicators as road signs. Immigration, as of late, has been wielded like a political weapon—used in campaign attack ads and across the media to slander opponents and set the political stage for what’s to come (read: more angry rhetoric and no action). As the Immigration Policy Center noted in its recent report on the New American voter, one in ten registered voters is likely to have a personal connection to immigration that may very well affect their views on candidates. Read More
More Election Time Anti-Immigrant Antics
There are several things the public can count on each election season—a deluge of non-stop political advertising, daily tracking polls, and now to an increasing degree, false claims about immigrants by politicians looking for a cheap way to score political points. Read More
U.S. Border Czar Calls on Congress to Get Serious about Immigration Reform
While some candidates continue to make political fodder out of immigration and border security on the campaign trail, administration officials are pushing Congress to get real about overhauling our broken immigration system. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner, Alan Bersin, recently commented that Congress needs to ‘get serious about a post-election immigration overhaul if the nation is to deal with the duality of enforcing border security while facilitating trade.’ In the wake of the nation’s SB1070-inspired border frenzy, some may be surprised to learn that there’s more to immigration than targeting undocumented immigrants and securing the border. A big part of Bersin’s job also involves regulating the flow of trade and commerce across the border, as well as expediting travel—priorities that tend to get lost in empty debate over who's the toughest on undocumented immigration. Read More
Census Data Confirms Immigrant Voting Bloc Still Growing
Today, the Immigration Policy Center released its latest report documenting the size and importance of an emerging voting bloc, New Americans (naturalized U.S. citizens and children of immigrants born after 1965 when the current wave of immigration from Latin American and Asia began). In The New American Electorate: The Growing Political Power of Immigrants and their Children, IPC charts the growth of immigrant, Asian and Latino voters using Census data. The reasons to keep a close eye on this growing demographic—who now account for 1 in 10 registered voters in the U.S.—is that New Americans have a highly personal connection to the modern immigrant experience (as do many Latinos and Asians) and are part of families that live the political and economic realities of immigration today. So in other words, when you demonize an immigrant, you may be demonizing a voter. Read More
The New American Electorate (October 2010)
At a time when federal, state, and local elections are often decided by small voting margins—with candidates frequently locked in ferocious competition for the ballots of those “voting blocs” that might turn the electoral tide in their favor—one large and growing bloc of voters has been consistently overlooked and politically underestimated: New Americans. This group of voters and potential voters includes not only immigrants who have become U.S. citizens (Naturalized Americans), but also the U.S.-born children of immigrants who were raised during the current era of large-scale immigration from Latin America and Asia which began in 1965 (the Post-1965 Children of Immigrants). Read More
Immigration and the Environment: Why the “Over-Population” Argument Doesn’t Hold Water
A new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) thoroughly debunks the simplistic claims of nativist groups that immigration to the United States fuels the destruction of the U.S. environment by contributing to “over-population” of the country. The report, entitled From a “Green Farce” to a Green Future: Refuting False Claims About Immigrants and the Environment, points out that the “over-population” argument of the nativists is based on the false premise that more people automatically produce more pollution. However, the truth of the matter is that “more people do not necessarily equal more stress on the planet, and stopping the flow of immigrants to this country will not solve our environmental challenges.” In fact, the report finds that “immigrants actually live greener than most Americans and they can play a critical role in solving our environmental challenges.” Read More
From Bad to Worse: Immigrant Smearing in a Time of Midterm Cholera
Well it’s finally here—open season on immigrants. You don’t even have to stare into the headlights of campaign politics to observe how blithely some candidates have taken aim at their opponents and managed to catch immigrants in their crosshairs. Two recent campaign ads portray undocumented immigrants as darkly-clothed thieves—like in one of those overly-dramatized alarm system commercials where just when you turn your back, Hispanic immigrants apparently come sneaking across the border, receive over-sized checks, and steal your children’s college tuition. Right. Read More
Utah Leaders Balk at Arizona-esque Immigration Enforcement Bill
With midterm election campaigning well underway, some local candidates are lifting up state and local immigration enforcement legislation as a means to garner public support. Unfortunately, as is often the case when politics meets reality, not everyone is on board with local enforcement laws like Arizona’s SB1070—key provisions of which were enjoined by a federal district judge in late July. Over the last few months, state leaders in Ohio, Idaho, Nebraska and Houston have either heavily edited or voted not to pursue state immigration measures, citing costly lawsuits, court battles and the dubious constitutionality of such laws. This month, state leaders in Utah are also balking at an immigration measure modeled on the controversial Arizona law. Read More
Sen. Menendez Aims for Lame Duck, Urges Advocates to Focus on Policy of CIR 2010
There can be advantages to going it alone. Despite two years of repeated attempts to get a bipartisan immigration reform bill in the Senate, Senators Menendez (D-NJ) and Leahy (D-VT) finally said “enough” and introduced the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2010 (CIR 2010) last week. Plenty of people have pointed out that the bill was introduced just as Congress left Washington to go into full-time campaign mode, leaving Sens. Menendez and Leahy virtually alone in Washington to promote their new bill. On a conference call Friday, however, Sen. Menendez said he aims at moving the bill during lame duck session or next Congress, but urged advocates and the media to focus on the merits of the bill, rather than the timing. (Other immigration bills passed during lame duck include the LIFE Act and NACARA.) Read More
Polls Show Latinos and Republicans Still Drifting Apart
As Congress’ attention to lawmaking wanes in place of politicking and mid-term elections, a string of new polls are emerging that further depict the strained relationship between Latinos and Republicans. The GOP strategy of alienating the fastest growing demographic through harsh rhetoric and the blockage of immigration reform is starting to reap results. Much like polls that emerged after the failure of comprehensive immigration reform in 2007, Latinos are steadily edging away from the GOP. Read More
America's story is an immigrant story.
