Placido Salazar

psalazar9@satx.rr.com
POLITICO -Magazine

Hating on Pope Francis

Sponsored Content

Obama's citizenship push stokes conservative fears

The administration is accelerating naturalization for millions of legal residents
many of whom will probably vote Democratic.
By Sarah Wheaton
By Joseph B. Fuller , Karen G. Mills and Jan W. Rivkin
By Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
The Obama administration and its allies are holding scores of events this week as part of a
sweeping new initiative to nudge 8.8 million legal residents who are eligible for naturalization
to become full-fledged citizens and therefore, eligible to vote. The not-so-secret
expectation is that most of them would probably register as Democrats, given the
demographics heavy on Hispanics and Asians a fact that has not been lost on many
conservatives.
Were getting lower-income people who are coming in and taking more services, and theyre
drawn to the Democrats, said Ed Martin, president of the right-wing Eagle Forum, which raised
the alarm last year in a report titled How Mass (Legal) Immigration Dooms a Conservative
Republican Party. Thats what Obama knows, and thats what the Democrats know, and thats
what Republicans should know and should be fighting back against it, Martin said.
It turns out that many Republicans consider legal immigration a more immediate and existential
threat to the GOP than illegal immigration. While the total number of illegal immigrants is
estimated at 11 million, there are more than 13 million permanent legal residents and that
number could grow at a clip of a million a year.

Kerry: U.S. to take in more refugees

By Nahal Toosi

Most of those green card holders are already on a path to becoming citizens and voters, and
their politics skew Democratic. The White Houses Stand Stronger initiative, announced last
week, aims to remove barriers for permanent residents to apply for full citizenship, including
the right to vote. The White House and its partners are planning 70 outreach events in the first
week alone, as well as 200 naturalization ceremonies that will induct 36,000 new citizens over
the same period. The administration has also lowered other financial barriers to obtaining

citizenship, including accepting credit cards to pay the fee, and its considering further reducing
costs for those who have low incomes but make too much to have the fee waived completely.
More than 30 percent of the green card holders eligible to apply for citizenship are originally
from Mexico, according to federal data. Of the top 10 countries of origin, only two Canada
and the United Kingdom are not in Latin America or Asia. Conservatives have increasingly
been raising the alarm about legal immigration as a more imminent threat to Republican power
than any possible pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented people
living in the U.S.
Just last month, immigration hard-liner Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) called for reducing the
number of green cards issued each year, warning that the government is on track to allow 10
million new permanent residents into the country over the next 10 years. While his analysis
focused on what he considered the potential negative economic impacts, the political
implications were unsubtly telegraphed in the states cited to put the 10 million figure into
perspective: The new residents would be larger than populations of Iowa, New Hampshire,
and South Carolina combined.

2016

Why Hispanics are thanking Donald Trump

By Eliza Collins
The Eagle Forum paper cites Pew polling data showing that Asians and Hispanics tend to
support bigger government providing more services at significantly higher rates than the
general public. Republicans can never turn liberal-leaning immigrants and their adult children
into supporters of limited government faster than the current high level of legal immigration
(one million a year) is bringing in new liberal voters, the report warns.
The White House insists the initiative was not focused on elections and was simply part of
Citizenship Day on Sept. 17. The White House's initiative coincides with a visit to
Washington by Pope Francis, a strong champion of immigrants. The Catholic Church has long
advocated for immigration reform in the United States, and the pope had even hoped to visit
the U.S.-Mexico border during his trip, though he decided not to for logistical reasons. Although
the Obama administration didn't explicitly link its plans to Francis, the rollout could take
advantage of the general mood in town during the visit of the highly popular, Argentine-born
pontiff.
The idea of raising awareness about the rights, responsibilities and importance of citizenship is
not a partisan idea, said a White House spokesperson. But it comes as members of the
administration up to President Barack Obama himself have been stepping up their critique
of Republicans anti-immigrant rhetoric. Vice President Joe Biden denounced what he called
Donald Trumps sick message on immigration, telling a gathering of business leaders last
week that government should be welcoming, rather than disparaging immigrants as sources
of economic dynamism.
Trump, for his part, echoed earlier remarks when he said, We have a lot of really bad dudes in
this country from outside.

Those remarks will galvanize Hispanics, said Janet Murgua, head of the National Council of La
Raza, a strong backer of the administrations efforts on immigration.
Latinos are responding against this demonization in the most American of ways: immigrants
who are eligible are becoming citizens, she wrote in a recent blog post, and those who are
citizens are registering to vote. According to United States Citizenship and Immigration
Services, it takes an average of six months to complete the naturalization process.
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
Sarah Wheaton is a White House reporter for Politico.
Authors:
Sarah Wheaton
swheaton@politico.com
@swheaton
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/obama-citizenship-immigrants-naturalizationdemocrats-213810#ixzz3mO1kGzdD