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AAI in the News

More Naturalized Citizens Are Expected at the Polls

By Gaiutra Bahadur
Philadelphia Inquirer
Posted on Sunday October 31, 2004

The signs could be found in places where pollsters and politicians don’t often go: in mosques across the region, at the annual Penn’s Landing Caribbean Festival, outside noodle shops in the city’s Asian strip malls.

Sometimes the signs were literal: “Viva Bush” in the window of a Washington Avenue taqueria.

Mostly they were more subtle: a word from an imam, a voter registration booth nudged between soca dance music CD and jerk-chicken vendors, giveaways of a Vietnamese magazine flourishing on its cover a doctored photograph of John Kerry beside Jane Fonda at an antiwar rally.

This year, activists pushed with a vigor not seen in elections past to register naturalized U.S. citizens and get them to the polls. The record number of all-new potential voters nationwide injects an erratic element into the presidential contest because no one is sure who they are and how they might vote. Groups that reach out to immigrants say they make up a significant part of that unknown.

“Immigrant groups themselves have been actively involved in this election in ways they haven’t been in previous elections,” said Tsiwin Law, once chairman of the city’s Commission on Asian American Affairs and a Democratic activist.

“I didn’t see this excitement four years ago,” Law said. “A lot of times people don’t want to display bumper stickers. This year, people want lawn signs. They want bumper stickers.”

The voter rolls in the five-county area have grown by about 230,000 people since April. The data does not describe ethnic background, but groups in the region report registering many immigrants for the first time.

The Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition registered about 700 people just sworn in as citizens at the National Constitution Center in ceremonies beginning in May.

The Philadelphia social-service group Congreso registered 500 voters, half immigrants, as part of a national drive featuring spots on Univision and projected to galvanize a million first-time Latino voters.

Every weekend for months, Loi Ma, a Republican canvasser from Cherry Hill, crisscrossed supermarkets in Asian enclaves across the region in a gray election mobile flanked by the South Vietnamese flag. He said he registered 1,000 new voters.

The momentum has grown in places that didn’t even exist during Bush v. Gore, such as the brick mosque in Lansdale that used to be a Catholic social club. Now, not only do they exist, they also serve as places to mobilize voters. At the mosque, between the adhan, or calls to prayer five times daily, there were also calls to vote that netted 80 new registrations since August among the mainly immigrant worshipers.

“This is freedom country, so I’m going to vote for Kerry,” said Safira Alam, a Bangladeshi immigrant who became a U.S. citizen two years ago and will be voting for the first time this week. Her husband heeded calls at the mosque to vote.

A list of voters who registered this year seems to point to a leap among naturalized U.S. citizens. In Lansdale, about 250 residents with Asian, Middle Eastern or Latino surnames – or roughly one-third the number of immigrants eligible to vote there in 2000 – signed up as first-time voters this year.

The heightened interest breaks with a pattern. With notable exceptions, immigrants have been slow to assimilate by casting votes, choosing instead to build an economic stake in American society first. It has taken at least a generation for politics to matter to them.

Anger at President Bush for policies at home and abroad that are perceived as profiling South Asians and Middle Easterners has fueled some of the shift.

“How could you be a brown person in America and vote for Bush?” asked Swapna Mukherjee, a North Wales resident, at the Kerry rally Monday in Center City.

“Everyone I know has been stopped at an airport,” said Marwan Kreidie, head of the Arab American Community Development Corp. He estimates that 800 Arab Americans in the region registered to vote at mosques and festivals recently.

An Oct. 21 poll of Arab American registered voters in four battleground states, including Pennsylvania, found that only 30 percent wanted Bush reelected. The President won the Arab American vote nationwide by 8 percentage points in 2000.

“He had the community, like he had the country, after Sept. 11,” but lost them as a result of the Iraq war and the Patriot Act, pollster James Zogby said last week. With a projected turnout of 510,000 voters in the swing states of Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, Arab Americans could be a decisive bloc in this election, he said.

Even so, advocates say yearlong backlogs at the Department of Homeland Security will keep tens of thousands of citizens-in-waiting from the polls.

“I wanted to vote,” said Eyedin Saif, a Center City hotel valet from Ethiopia who eyed the Kerry rally from the sidelines. “I applied for citizenship more than a year ago, and I still didn’t get it.”

The political interest by immigrants is not entirely explained by a backlash against Bush.

For one, the Vietnamese community has been roused against Kerry, because he turned against a war in which many of them fought alongside U.S. soldiers. Many of them, fiercely Republican, back the Iraq war.

“It’s indicative of the interest in this particular election in the voting population as a whole,” said Jan Ting, a Bush backer, an immigration law expert at Temple University and a former assistant commissioner at the nation’s immigration agency.

“Just as we expect a larger turnout in this election than in any recent election, it’s also reasonable to expect a larger turnout among those recently naturalized,” he said.

“This is a close election with high stakes for everyone.”