THE STATE : The Unintended Political Earthquake Set Off by Prop. 187

No place in the United States will be more thoroughly transformed by the greatest rush for citizenship in this nation’s history than Los Angeles. The county, which has experienced the destabilizing and invigorating effects of global migration for two decades, stands to receive a huge injection of stability.

Latino immigrants, who account for nearly two-thirds of L.A.’s foreign-born population, have been the region’s political missing link. Although the public outcry over illegal immigration has many assuming that most immigrants from south of the border are undocumented, eight in 10 of the county’s foreign-born Latinos reside here legally. Before Proposition 187, however, relatively few had acquired the rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship. The result: Too many Angelenos did not have a vested interest in the political life of the metropolis, and that Los Angeles and Orange counties share the dubious distinction of being home to five of the eight congressional districts with the fewest eligible voters in the country.

Alienation from civic decision-making can leave residents uncommitted to their communities. While lack of a sense of civic proprietorship is a national problem crossing ethnic boundaries, the huge number of Latino non-citizens in Los Angeles has made the local situation more serious. At the time of the city’s last mayoral election, one in three adult residents were not citizens. Since elected officials serve the interests of voters who elect them, neighborhoods with high concentrations of non-voters tend to be neglected.

Today, tens of thousands of Latinos attending citizenship classes at schools, churches and community centers around the county say their overriding reason for becoming U.S. citizens is to participate in electoral politics. The L.A. district office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service is currently receiving about 25,000 citizen applications a month. Nearly half of all immigrants naturalized in Los Angeles are of Latin American origin. Given the political climate, the INS doesn’t expect the numbers to decline.

While English-language news may not always mention them, Spanish-language media regularly reports on the small provisions within larger congressional bills that seek to deny a growing list of benefits to legal immigrants, such as the Gramm Amendment, which would make permanent resident aliens ineligible for student aid, children’s protective services and Medicare for five years. What many immigrants feared last fall during the debate over Proposition 187 has come true: The anti-illegal immigrant campaign has become the anti-immigrant campaign. The national mood has made a significant portion of the more than 1 million foreign-born Latinos eligible for citizenship in the county politically conscious and eager to participate.

In the next two years, Los Angeles County stands to gain as many as 200,000 naturalized registered voters. There are likely to be hundreds of thousands more by the end of the decade. South-, Central-, and East Los Angeles, as well as the Southeast cities, will experience the sharpest rise in foreign-born voters. The Northeast San Fernando Valley and the Central San Gabriel Valley will also see dramatic increases.

The rush to citizenship is bound to affect the racial makeup of L.A.’s political leadership. Councilwoman Rita Walters, state Assemblywoman Marguerite Archie-Hudson, Rep. Maxine Waters are among the many African American-elected officials whose districts contain large numbers of Latino immigrant residents eligible for citizenship. About 40,000 amnesty applicants live in Walters’ district alone. And amnesty applicants represent only about half of all Latino immigrants eligi ble for citizenship in California. Political scientist Fernando Guerra of Loyola Marymount University, who has studied black and Latino politics in Los Angeles, believes that the number of local, state and federal seats currently held by African Americans could very likely be cut by half within a decade.

Still, most increases in foreign-born registered voters will be in districts already represented by Latino officials. The only two congressional districts whose number of voters did not decline in the usual post-presidential-election attrition in registration are the very two districts with the greatest numbers of naturalizing immigrants--Xavier Becerra’s 30th and Lucille Roybal-Allard’s 33rd congressional districts. Roybal-Allard, whose district has the highest percentage of non-citizen residents and lowest number of voters of any in the country, says that representatives of districts like hers only stand to gain in political power. Their agendas will, for the first time ever, have numbers behind them.

A larger, more diversified and active electorate will simultaneously make Latino politicians much more accountable to their constituents. Meantime, though, the Latino legislators who have sponsored citizenship and registration drives through independent groups, like the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and Southwest Voter Registration Project, will have to acquaint themselves with their long-hoped for constituents.

Arturo Vargas, executive director of NALEO, contends that while there is a strong ethnic connection between latter-generation American Latino elected officials and naturalized Latin American immigrants, Latino politicians will, nonetheless, have to learn more about the needs and concerns of the growing number of foreign-born voters, a constituency considered by many to be politically and socially conservative. Politicians who represent generationally diverse Latino districts will have to balance what could be considered the traditional civil-rights-oriented agenda of latter-generation Latino Americans and the more conservative agenda of the foreign-born.

In a survey conducted by Harry Pachon of the Tomas Rivera Center before the debate over last year’s anti-illegal-immigrant initiative, 60% of Latino immigrants eligible for citizenship said they had not decided with which political party they would register once naturalized. In recent years, California Republican candidates have been able to expect up to 40% of the Latino vote. But in a poll taken this month at a Huntington Park citizenship class, 90% of the students said they would register Democrat. Because the Republican Party has become known among many Latinos as the anti-immigrant party, it has done a good job of pushing away what many conservatives feel is their natural constituency. Nonetheless, the state Republican Party is way ahead of the Democrats in terms of strategizing ways to appeal to naturalized Latino immigrants.

But political parties don’t live at the street level. And that is where the mass enfranchisement of immigrant Latinos will be felt first. The sense of civic responsibility and proprietorship will spread from block to block before it affects either side of the aisle. According to Guerra, new citizen voters, along with the hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born Latinos who will turn 18 and register to vote in L.A. County in the next 10 years, have more than a fair chance of installing a Latino mayor in City Hall by 2005.*