CAIFORNIA ELECTIONS : State Has Most Non-Voting Immigrants, Study Finds

California, which has more potential voters than any other state in the nation, also leads the United States in disenfranchisement, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today.

According to a new study based on 1990 population figures, an estimated 3.7 million Californians--more potential voters than in any other state--cannot vote because they are not U.S. citizens.

The figure accounts for an unparalleled 16.8% of the state’s potential electorate and includes more than a fifth of Los Angeles County’s voting-age population. All told, the bureau found, these non-voters accounted for more than a third of the 10-million U.S. immigrants who had not been naturalized by 1990 and were therefore ineligible to vote.

Census officials said the study represents the bureau’s first attempt to measure the impact of the last decade’s massive immigration on voter rolls as the nation moves into the next century.

The study also shows that naturalization in California and Los Angeles County, according to one voter registration group, “continues to be alive and well.”

By 1990, the figures show, foreign-born citizens represented a 10th of California’s voting-age population, and 15.5% of the electorate in immigrant-rich Los Angeles County.

“It’s encouraging to see that naturalization is still going strong and is not just a historical curiosity we associate with black-and-white pictures of Ellis Island,” said Harry Pachon, director of the Los Angeles-based National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

“But at the same time, there are a tremendous number of people who have not become citizens, and the question of their political integration is something this state has yet to deal with,” he said.

Susan Lapham, the census statistician who wrote the report, acknowledged that the precise count of non-citizens may have changed slightly during the past two years. But she said it is unlikely that the change has been substantial.

As of 1990, the census found, 185,103,329 people over the age of 18 lived in the United States. Of those, 10,017,892--or 5.4%--were not U.S. citizens.

Because similar studies had not been conducted before, Lapham said, it was unclear whether the number of disenfranchised people was greater than in previous decades. However, she noted, the 1980s were a decade of record U.S. immigration.

The study was performed in response to outside requests for data that might measure the effect of immigration on the coming election.

Nowhere was the impact of that mass migration as dramatic as in California, which accounted for 3,707,357 of the nation’s adults who are not U.S. citizens. Those immigrants represent 16.8% of the state’s voting-age population, a higher proportion than in any other state. (New York was a distant second with 9.8%.)

Nowhere in California was the impact of immigration as clear as it was in Los Angeles County, which accounted for 1,762,347 of those non-citizens. If those people could vote, the figures show, they would represent more than 21% of the county’s electorate.

Pachon, whose organization has focused for five years on encouraging citizenship, said that disenfranchisement is particularly marked among Latino immigrants.

“In November, one out of two Latino adults in this state will be unable to vote because of citizenship,” he said. “We receive a tremendous influx of immigrants every year, and we haven’t woken up yet to what that really means.”

Pachon and others blamed the massive numbers on the failure of the U.S. government and the nation’s major political parties to encourage naturalization and citizenship.

Surveys by his organization, Pachon said, have found that many legal immigrants choose not to become U.S. citizens because they are intimidated by the paperwork, misunderstand the educational requirements or fail to realize that they could benefit by exercising their right to vote.

“Imagine!” Pachon said, “1.7-million non-citizens in Los Angeles County, and no office here to promote citizenship. And a lot of those people are legal immigrants.”

Don Nakanishi, who directs UCLA’s Asian-American Studies Center, agreed that neither political party has yet been able to fully capitalize on the foreign-born vote.

Studies on party affiliation during the past five years, for instance, have showed a reluctance among immigrant voters to join political parties--either because they associate party affiliation with strife in their homelands or because they simply haven’t been energetically recruited.

“It’s hard to predict how they’ll vote,” Nakanishi said.

But, Pachon added, naturalized citizens vote: A national survey performed by his organization in 1989 found that about 80% of those who obtain citizenship exercise their right to vote, about 10% higher than the participation among native-born Americans.