Immigrant Advocates Turn Focus to Ballot Box

Aiming to transform street passions into political power, organizers of recent immigrant rights marches Tuesday announced a national campaign to produce 1 million new citizens and voters by the November mid-term elections.

The drive will “channel the unprecedented momentum of our previous marches into a targeted mass campaign for civic action,” Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Gabino Zavala said at a news conference at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles.

Flanked by immigrant mothers holding white Mother’s Day roses to symbolize their separation from families back home, Zavala said the campaign marked the immigrant movement’s next step to press for legislation that would provide more visas to reunify families and legalize the nation’s estimated 11.5 million undocumented migrants.

Since March, hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters have staged marches, rallies, school walkouts and a boycott of work and consumer spending across the nation in support of legalization and other changes.

On Tuesday, representatives of religious, labor and community groups announced that they would designate May 17 as a national lobbying day, sending immigrant advocates from around the nation to Washington and hundreds of thousands of postcards urging change.

In Los Angeles on that day, churches, union offices and community centers will be transformed into “immigrant justice action centers” to pass out citizenship applications, register voters and offer phones for voters to call their elected representatives. Voter registration stations would also be set up on the streets, organizers said.

The steps are timed to influence the shaping of an immigration bill, which could be produced by a conference committee of Senate and House members by the end of May.

Some activists predicted that the campaign would produce a new surge of Latino citizens -- and voters -- even greater than the wave that followed the 1994 passage of California’s Proposition 187, which would have denied public benefits to illegal immigrants had it not been overturned by federal courts.

The number of legal residents who became U.S. citizens, for instance, more than doubled from 434,000 in 1994 to 1 million in 1996, according to Rosalind Gold of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund in Los Angeles. Among them, the share of Latinos grew from 27% in 1994 to 43% in 1996, she said.

And Latino registered voters in California grew from 1.6 million in 1996 to 1.9 million in 2000, with naturalized citizens accounting for the majority of the increase, she added.

Gold said some studies suggest that Latin American immigrants naturalize at lower rates than other immigrant groups, partly because the United States is relatively close to their homelands. One U.S. government study showed that only 14% of legal residents admitted from Mexico in 1982 had legalized by 1995, compared with rates of 60% and higher for migrants from some Asian countries.

But Los Angeles organizers said Tuesday that the current fierce debate over immigration would again prompt record numbers of immigrants to naturalize and register to vote, particularly since leading Spanish-language radio DJs have agreed to help.

They include Renan Almendarez “El Cucuy” Coello, who appeared at the news conference, planted a white rose in his lapel, and pledged to promote the campaign on his nationally syndicated radio show.

The campaign marks the first of several nationally coordinated political actions by the We Are America Alliance, a new network of hundreds of religious, labor and community organizations in 40 states pressing for legalization and other changes, according to Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

She said the alliance would launch an “Immigrant Democracy Summer” on July 1 to produce a million new voters and citizens. On Labor Day weekend, the alliance plans to mobilize 1 million marchers around the country.

“I think this campaign can have 10 times the momentum that we had in 1994, post-Prop. 187,” said Mike Garcia, president of Local 1877 of the Service Employees International Union. “Los Angeles, being the largest immigrant community in the nation, needs to lead the way.”