Abstract
In this article, the author analyzes five domains of immigrant incorporation and participation in the United States—civic and community engagement among immigrants; naturalization patterns; immigrant (and co-ethnic) partisanship and electoral behaviors; the election of naturalized citizens, and their U.S.-born co-ethnics, as elective officeholders; and immigrant transnational efforts to influence the civic or political life of their communities or countries of origin—in an effort to highlight both the opportunities immigrants and naturalized citizens have seized in U.S. politics and the barriers, particularly, institutional barriers, they continue to face. Although the primary analytical focus is immigrants in the United States, the author is attentive to the challenge raised by Irene Bloemraad (2011 [this issue]) in her introductory article to identify opportunities for comparative insights from the Canadian case. As will be evident, the author ultimately identifies more apples and oranges in the comparison of the U.S. and Canadian cases than peas sharing an analytical pod.
The 2008 election offers a series of positive indicators of the incorporation of immigrants in U.S. electoral politics. More than 8.3 million naturalized U.S. citizens voted in the November elections. They made up approximately 6.3% of the U.S. electorate (U.S. Census Bureau, 2009, Table 13). The immigrant vote grew by more than 1 million from 2004, and the number of naturalized registered voters increased by more than 1.3 million (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005, Table 13). The national 2008 exit poll did not ask the nativity of voters as it had in some previous elections, but immigrants and their U.S.-born co-ethnics voted overwhelmingly for Obama and the Democrats. Two of three Latinos and 6 of 10 Asian Americans voted for Obama; in each case, these shares of votes for the Democrats reflected increases compared with 2004 (The New York Times, 2008). Obama, the child of an immigrant from Africa, seized the ethnic diversity of his family (including his Asian American sister and her extended family) in his campaign biography and his self-presentation on the stump. Immigrant votes contributed to Obama’s electoral college and popular vote margins (365 to 173 in the electoral college and 69.3 million to 59.6 million in the popular vote).
The direct influence of these naturalized-citizen votes on the Obama victory is difficult to measure and is contingent on the division of the votes of the U.S.-born citizens. In at least two states where the native-born electorate was nearly divided, Indiana and North Carolina, a small naturalized electorate allied with African American voters contributed to surprise and very narrow Obama victories and the award of all of their electoral college votes. Naturalized voters were important in determining the allocation of these states only because of the division in the votes of U.S.-born voters, but their influence has also been felt in the larger states. California, for example, has become an overwhelmingly Democratic state in statewide elections, presidential voting, and the state’s vote in the electoral college in part because of the rapid increase in the number of naturalized voters and in the votes of their U.S.-born co-ethnics in the past 15 years and the strong preference of these new voters for Democratic candidates (Fraga, Ramírez, & Segura, 2005). The surge in naturalized-citizen voters nationally in the 2008 election reflected some targeted efforts at mobilization but also resulted from a surge in the eligible population. Between 2005 and 2008, more than 3.2 million immigrants naturalized (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2009). This surge resulted in part from immigrant community organizing in 2006 to oppose a highly restrictive immigration bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives (DeSipio, in press).
The positive indicators, some of which were highly contingent on the composition of U.S.-born voters, of immigrant participation from the 2008 election mask a set of institutional barriers that have slowed immigrant civic and political participation in the United States in the modern era (since the 1965 reforms to U.S. immigration law; DeSipio, 2001). Despite the increase in naturalized-citizen voters, for example, the naturalized did not achieve parity with the share of naturalized citizens among the adult population (see Table 1). The naturalized made up 6.3% of voters and 7.5% of adults, a slightly wider gap than in 2004 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005, 2009). Although naturalization rates have been increasing somewhat, more than 19 million adult immigrants were not naturalized in 2008 (Passel, 2007). Again, this number was slightly higher than in 2004. With the steady growth in immigration to the United States, and the higher share of this migration made up of unauthorized immigrants, the consequences of these barriers for immigrant political incorporation have grown in recent years.
Naturalized U.S. Citizen Adults as a Share of the U.S. Population and Voters, 2000, 2004, and 2008.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2002, 2005, 2009).
In this article, I analyze five domains of immigrant incorporation and participation in the United States in an effort to highlight both the opportunities immigrants and naturalized citizens have seized in U.S. politics and the barriers they continue to face. Although my primary focus is the United States, I am attentive to the challenge raised by Irene Bloemraad to identify opportunities for comparative insights from the Canadian case. As will be evident, I ultimately identify more apples and oranges (Dunkin Donuts and Tim Horton’s, perhaps) than peas sharing an analytical pod.
I begin with an assessment of civic and community engagement among immigrants. This is frequently the first form of politics that appears in immigrant communities in large part because immigrants, regardless of legal or citizenship status, can participate in civic life. Frequently, immigrants, who are sometimes resistant to becoming politically engaged out of fear for their legal status in their new country of residence or out of a desire to maintain home country political engagement as their primary form of political engagement, become civically engaged without even realizing that they are being “political,” such as when they become involved in parent-teacher associations at their children’s schools. Weak civic institutions in the contemporary United States frequently ensure that the civic participation is lower than for the U.S. born and, seemingly, than for immigrants in Canada.
Second, I analyze naturalization patterns both in terms of numbers of naturalizing citizens and reasons that some immigrants pursue naturalization and others do not. Canada and the United States offer significantly different resources to promote naturalization and, not surprisingly, see very different outcomes.
Third, I evaluate immigrant (and co-ethnic) partisanship and electoral behaviors. As will be evident, the major barrier to full incorporation immigrants face in each of these domains is the absence of strong institutions of incorporation. There is little public infrastructure to support the political incorporation of immigrants—as there was in previous periods of high immigration to the United States—and community-based organizing largely neglects potential new participants, focusing instead on individuals and communities who have shown a willingness to participate in the past (Putnam, 2000; Verba, Schlozman, & Brady, 1995). Contemporary immigrants, then, are not the targets of state or civil society efforts to ensure their ongoing disengagement. Instead, they have come of political age in an era of low civic engagement, so community organizational resources that previously existed to incorporate at least some immigrants have atrophied. Consequently, immigrants in the United States participate at lower levels than do their U.S.-born co-ethnics. Cross-national differences between Canadian and U.S. voters cloud direct comparisons (Canadians turn out at rates approximately 20% higher than U.S. citizens), but here again, differences outweigh similarities.
Next, I assess the election of naturalized citizens, and their U.S.-born co-ethnics, as elective officeholders in the United States. Here, perhaps, legislative design—specifically, the majority-minority districting provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA, Epstein, Pildes, de la Garza & O’Halloran, 2006; Henderson, 2007)—ensures somewhat higher representation than in Canada, at least for non-White officeholders. Equally importantly, the VRA ensures that immigrants and their U.S.-born co-ethnics can achieve national as well as local elective offices. Most of these ethnic elected representatives, however, are U.S. born.
The final domain that I analyze offers a potential to break this pattern and to establish community-level resources to facilitate immigrant incorporation, although their initial focus may not be on civic and political engagement in the United States. These are the emerging transnational efforts to influence the civic or political life of their communities or countries of origin. This form of politics remains an activity of the minority of immigrants, but like civic engagement in the country of residence, transitional activities are open to all immigrants, regardless of status. In the past decade, an infrastructure has emerged to facilitate immigrants’ desires to maintain a role in their communities of origin, including hometown associations, state (of origin) federations, philanthropic associations to facilitate economic development in the communities of origin, and formal structures to shape national policy in the countries of origin. These new organizational structures not only facilitate transnational engagement among immigrants but also offer new points of access for U.S.-based civic institutions to reach immigrant populations and for these transnational organizations themselves to transition to serving the U.S.-based needs of their memberships. This pattern appeared to some degree in the 2006 immigrant rights protests. In other words, the transnational organizations can help to overcome the dearth of civic and political outreach to immigrants and ethnic communities in the United States. Transnational engagement, a relatively recent phenomenon for the mass of immigrants, seems to have emerged more rapidly in the United States than in Canada. As the United States slowly debates reforms to its immigration laws, the transnational organizations have taken on an added role in immigrant communities, speeding their development in the United States relative to Canada.
Civic and Community Engagement
Most community-level political activities do not require citizenship, so civic engagement and community-level political activities are open to unauthorized immigrants and legal immigrants not yet eligible for naturalization as well as to naturalized U.S. citizens. These include passive activities, such as following politics in the news, or political behaviors, such participation in the 2006 protests, membership in community-based organizations, petitioning of government, participation in school-based parental organizations, contribution of time or money to candidates or political organizations, or, in rare cases, assuming organizational leadership roles or running for political office. Immigrants participate in each of these forms of civic or political behavior in both Canada and the United States. Both countries, however, see a pattern of lower levels of civic participation by immigrants than by the native born.
Like U.S.-born ethnic community members, immigrants are most likely to engage politics more passively, for example, by following politics in the news. Approximately 80% of Latino immigrants, for example, follow U.S. politics in the news (DeSipio, 2003, Table 4). Political behaviors requiring more active engagement are less frequent. In Asian American communities, approximately 18% of immigrants have worked with others to solve a community problem, 10% have donated to a political campaign, 9% have written or phoned a government office to seek a solution to a problem, 7% have protested or demonstrated, 2% have served on a government board or commission, and 1% have worked on a political campaign (Lien, Conway, & Wong 2004). Similar patterns appear among Latino immigrants in the United States. Surveys of Latinos find that certain types of organizations are particularly likely to attract immigrants as members. Approximately 35% of Latino parents, for example, report that they are members of parent-teacher associations in their children’s schools. Among Latino immigrants who live in major cities, approximately 17% are members of trade unions (author’s analysis of Fraga et al., 2006; DeSipio, 2003). In each of these forms of civic and political engagement, however, immigrants are somewhat less likely than those born in the United States to be civically or politically engaged.
This pattern is important for two reasons. First, it shows that immigrants seek to engage the civic and political life of the United States. Depending on the form of politics and the investment that is required, immigrants regularly make time and energy available to change their country of residence. As should be evident from the list of activities, this political engagement often requires that they work with nonimmigrants to achieve their common goals.
Second, this effort to engage U.S. civic life faces limits of time and opportunity, barriers that are not unique to immigrants. Civic and political engagement that requires time or money see lower levels of participation than those forms of engagement, such as following politics in the news, that do not require collective action. Immigrants, on average, are less likely to have the individual resources necessary for regular engagement in many forms of politics.
The gap in civic and political engagement between immigrants and the native born, however, should not simply be attributed to fewer individual-level resources in immigrant communities. Immigrants are less likely to be mobilized to participate. Political organizations, parties, and community organizations are likely to have less experience with immigrant populations and ethnic communities. As a result, they are less likely to reach out to immigrants to become involved in collective action (Verba et al., 1995). Without this mobilization, immigrants are less likely to know how to seek political influence. Traditionally, political machines offered this political education to some immigrants, at least in urban areas, but in the contemporary political culture of the United States, the responsibility for political education of immigrants is delegated to organizations and leaders, and they are frequently less willing to reach out to immigrants. Immigrant communities themselves have, for the most part, not developed their own civic infrastructures, although as I will suggest, this pattern may be changing (Pardo, 1998; Portes & Stepik, 1993; Rogers, 1990, as exceptions to the general pattern).
For the most part, immigrant civic participation appears at the local level. Periodically in U.S. history, these local energies become national. Immigrants opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts (which reduced access to naturalization and eased deportation of immigrants) in the late 1700s; their opposition contributed to the defeat of the Federalists and the election of Thomas Jefferson in the 1800 election (Muller, 1993). Immigrant organizing in the 1920s, which was initially focused on ending prohibition but shifted to economic concerns with the onset of the Great Depression, led to the foundation of the Roosevelt coalition and a generation of Democratic dominance in national politics.
We may be at the onset of another of these periods today. In late winter and early spring 2006, as many as 5 million immigrants to the United States and their family members protested nationwide to oppose legislation being debated in the U.S. Congress that would make immigrant residence in the United States without a visa a felony. Conviction of a felony would have the effect of preventing unauthorized immigrants from ever being eligible for legal immigrant status. This criminalization provision was part of a larger bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives to add new, restrictive enforcement provisions to U.S. immigration law. The large number of protestors and geographic dispersion of these protests surprised many in the United States (Bada, Fox, & Selee 2006; Benjamin-Alvarado, DeSipio, & Montoya-Kirk, 2009). The legislative consequence was felt quickly. Moderates in the U.S. Senate proposed legislation that included many of the enforcement provisions of the House bill but eliminated the criminalization provisions that inflamed the protests; the Senate bill also included opportunities for most unauthorized immigrants in the United States to eventually achieve legal status. The Senate bill did not pass either in 2006 or the next year, when it was reintroduced. Despite the resulting legislative stalemate, the 2006 protests demonstrate that the immigrant voice can be felt in U.S. politics (DeSipio, in press; Voss & Bloemraad, in press).
It is too early to say whether these protests reflect a new urgency in immigrant civic organizing or a move from local to national organizing. The coalition that facilitated and coordinated them included many new actors—hometown associations and state federations, unions (which until recently had not invested in organizing immigrants), and ethnic radio—as well as more traditional actors, such as churches, local political clubs, and immigrant service organizations. The new actors played a stronger role and evidently had better connections to immigrant communities. This is certainly positive evidence of a new foundation for immigrant civic incorporation and targeted activism. Of more concern, however, is that these organizations have not been able to repeat their organizational feats in the years since the 2006 protests. Admittedly, no issue has been as pressing as the criminalization provisions of the 2005 House bill since. The emergence of a vital and national civic network in immigrant (and ethnic) communities could over time reshape the current pattern of civic engagement in immigrant communities in which immigrants follow the patterns of low rates of participation seem among their U.S.-born co-ethnics, only at still-lower rates.
Naturalization
Naturalization offers immigrants the opportunity to exercise most of the rights of the native born and largely eliminates the risk that they could face deportation for activities engaged in after the award of citizenship. In the United States, for example, the naturalized are eligible for all rights and benefits of citizens by birth with the exception of not being able to serve as president or vice president. The naturalized can face denaturalization and, potentially, deportation if it can be proven that they lied to attain immigrant status or as part of the application for naturalization; permanent residents, on the other hand, can be deported if they are convicted of felonies or aggravated misdemeanors. Naturalization, then, is both a political act in itself—transferring loyalty from one sovereign to another or adding a sovereign to whom an individual owes fealty and expects protection—and a necessary step to engage in other forms of political engagement, such as voting.
The differences between the United States and Canada in immigrant incorporation policies and immigrant engagement in politics are most dramatic in the area of naturalization. The United States does little to promote naturalization and leaves the decision to naturalize to individuals and the responsibility for promoting and encouraging naturalization to civil society organizations (most commonly, immigrant support groups and ethnic organizations; DeSipio, 2001). Canada, on the other hand, actively promotes naturalization among the eligible and dedicates government resources to assist immigrants (and immigrant community organizations) in pursuing naturalization (Bloemraad, 2006a). Not surprisingly, Canada sees higher rates of naturalization among its immigrants. The laissez-faire approach of the United States, arguably, is becoming increasing anachronistic in an era of sustained immigration of approximately 1 million immigrants annually.
This dramatic increase in immigration in the 1990s and 2000s has spurred a commensurate increase in naturalization. At the same time, however, the number of naturalization-eligible non-U.S. citizens is growing. Naturalized citizens, for example, made up approximately 15% of new U.S. citizens in 2007 (the remaining 85% achieved citizenship at birth in the United States). With a dramatic increase in applications and a concerted effort by the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services to reduce the backlog in naturalization applications, this share grew to nearly 27% of new U.S. citizens in 2008. In the coming years, the share of new U.S. citizens resulting from naturalization is likely to be closer to the 2007 levels.
In 2007, more than 660,000 immigrants naturalized in the United States; in 2008, this number increased to approximately 1.1 million. Naturalizations in the first decade of the 21st century will number approximately 6.6 million, triple the number in the 1980s (see Table 2).
U.S. Naturalization, 1907 to 2010
Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2009, 2010).
Note: 2001-2010 (est.) is author’s estimate based on average annual naturalizations from 2001 to 2009.
The large number of naturalizing citizens obscures a large number of immigrants who are eligible to naturalize but do not and immigrants who are not eligible to naturalize. In the latter category are immigrants who migrate in a status that does not allow for eventual naturalization, – such as unauthorized immigrants, and recent immigrants who have not yet achieved the minimum period of residence to be eligible for naturalization (Passel, 2007).
Among naturalization-eligible immigrants, what distinguishes immigrants who do naturalize from those who do not? The longer an immigrant is resident, the higher the odds that he or she will have naturalized. Generally, the political ties to the country of origin diminish as immediate family members are able to migrate and the immigrant develops social and political networks in the country of migration. This sense of political connectedness to the country of destination that must precede a change in citizenship is often somewhat slower to develop than economic or social ties to the country of migration. As a result, immigrants tend not to naturalize as soon as they become eligible, and immigrants with long periods of residence are more likely to have naturalized than immigrants who have recently achieved statutory eligibility. In 2007, for example, the average time between legal immigration and naturalization for immigrants who naturalized in the United States was 7 years, 2 years more than the 5-year minimum residence for most U.S. immigrants to naturalize (Rytina & Caldera, 2008); some of this added time can be explained by applicant processing delays on the part of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. This average length of time between migration and naturalization among immigrants who do naturalize varies by country of origin and shows another truism in immigrant political adaptation: Migrants from countries closer to the country of residence are slower to naturalize than migrants whose countries or origin are more distant. Canadian and Mexican migrants are among the slowest to naturalize in the United States, a pattern that has remained consistent since the 1960s. In 2007, Canadians and Mexicans who naturalized had been resident in the United States for an average of 11 years. Considering the differences in the composition of the migration steam from Canada and Mexico and the consistency of this gap, it would appear that proximity alone—the relative ease of return visits that it offers—explains part of the delay in naturalization among immigrants naturalizing from Canada and Mexico. African, Asian, and European migrants, on the other hand, resided in the United States for just 6 years prior to migration.
These average lengths of legal residence prior to naturalization focus only on immigrants who naturalize. Some immigrants to the United States remain as permanent residents throughout their lives. It is not possible to present an exact number of these citizenship-eligible permanent non-U.S. citizens because the United States does not keep records of emigration of its citizens or permanent residents.
U.S. naturalization requires bureaucratic competence. The application processes requires completing a 10-page application form; submitting the application with ancillary materials, such as photographs and fingerprints; paying a $675 fee; taking an exam on civics and history; and, frequently, being patient while waiting for the application to be processed. Review of applications can take more than a year during periods of peak demand, such as 1995 to 1997 and 2006 to 2007. These expectations for naturalization applicants tend to reward those who have higher levels of education and higher incomes; these unstated expectations that immigrants can negotiate a complicate bureaucratic process appears in differences in which immigrants naturalize and which do not.
Generally, the naturalized are older, on average, than eligible immigrants as a whole; have higher levels of education; and have higher income. Immigrants who migrated with an ability to speak, read, and write English are more likely to naturalize, as are immigrants who had access to U.S. media prior to migration. Migrants who emigrated because of dissatisfaction with the political leadership of their county of origin are also more likely, on average, to naturalize. Migrants who entered the country initially as unauthorized immigrants and were later able to legalize their status and immigrants who worked primarily in low-status occupations are less likely to naturalize (Barkan & Khokolov, 1980; DeSipio, 1996a; Jasso & Rosenzweig, 1990; Yang, 1994).
The challenges that immigrants face in applying for naturalization can be overcome with state or private investment in assistance to immigrants pursuing citizenship. Canada, for example, alerts eligible immigrants when they become eligible to naturalize and sends government representatives to ethnic organizations to prepare potential applicants for the naturalization exam (Bloemraad, 2006a). The United States, on the other hand, treats naturalization as the responsibility of the individual, so does little direct promotion. To the extent that eligible immigrants do receive encouragement to naturalize or assistance with completing the form or preparing for the naturalization exam, it is provided by ethnic organizations or immigrant-serving community-based organizations. At periods of high immigrant interest in naturalization, community-based organizations have emerged to offer a wide range of naturalization promotion activities (DeSipio, 2001). In the 1990s, for example, this included television programs on Spanish- and Asian-language media giving step-by-step instructions on completing the naturalization application form, the use of immigrant celebrities to promote naturalization, naturalization workshops to provide individual assistance with the application form and legal assistance where needed, and even a loan fund, sponsored by financier George Soros, to help applicants pay the naturalization fee. This sort of community support for naturalization adds to the likelihood of naturalization, particularly in a system like that of the United States, in which the government does not promote naturalization among the eligible (Bloemraad, 2006b). Unfortunately for immigrants, these community-level resources appear only episodically in U.S. immigration history, during periods of particularly high interest in naturalization.
There is little evidence that immigrants eligible to naturalize who do not are uninterested in pursuing citizenship eventually. In the United States, for example, a survey of Latino immigrants eligible for naturalization found that almost all planned to reside permanently in the United States, and fewer than 15% had no plans to apply for naturalization at some point in the future. Few felt they would be found to be ineligible for naturalization (Pachon & DeSipio, 1994, chap. 6). The explanation for non-naturalization is more frequently found in the difficulty of the application process, the cost of applying, and the lack of availability of institutional resources to assist immigrants in pursuing naturalization.
Electoral Participation
When asked about the most important reasons for naturalizing, immigrants cite the right to vote. As will be evident, not all take advantage of this opportunity when naturalized, but in this attitude, immigrants echo the behaviors of the native-born population. Voting is the most common political act in the advanced democracies. Voting rates, however, vary across the advanced democracies, and the United States generally sees lower rates of voting the others, including Canada. Naturalized citizens in the United States follow the patterns of the U.S. born and vote at lower rates than do Canadian citizens. For reasons that I will discuss, the naturalized citizens in the United States vote at lower rates than those born in the United States.
Voting does not require national citizenship in all countries. Several European countries and U.S. cities have extended the right to vote to residents, regardless of citizenship. In Europe, for example, the Maastricht Treaty grants European citizens the right to vote in all European countries. Several countries within Europe—Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, several Swiss cantons, and Belgium—extend the local and, sometimes, national franchise to legal immigrants, sometimes after a required period of residence. Finland and Iceland extend voting rights to Nordic citizens. In the United States, several small cities permit non-U.S. citizens to vote in local elections—Cambridge and Amherst, Massachusetts, and Takoma Park, Maryland. Historically, noncitizen voting was much more common in the United States. At its peak in the late 19th century, approximately 22 states allowed noncitizens to vote, seeing the franchise as a tool to lure immigrants to the states that allowed noncitizen voting (Hayduk, 2006; Rosberg, 1977). Beginning at the turn of the 20th century, efforts to expand the franchise declined, and popular opinion turned against immigrants, leading to a steady decline in state laws permitting noncitizen voting. For the most part, however, voting today is a prerogative of U.S. citizens.
Despite the fact that immigrants report that voting is one of the most important reasons to naturalize, they do not necessarily vote at particularly high rates (see Tables 3 and 4). In the United States, immigrants register and vote at rates lower than U.S.-born citizens. Among the native born, 72% were registered to vote in the 2008 election, and 64% voted. The rates for naturalized U.S. citizens were 61% and 54%, respectively. Considering that voting is a behavior that is more likely when it is encouraged, that registration is an individual responsibility in the United States, and that many naturalized citizens live in areas that see little mobilization by candidates and parties, these lower-than-average registration and rates for the naturalized are not particularly surprising to analysts of U.S. electoral politics (DeSipio & de la Garza, 2005; de la Garza, DeSipio, & Leal, 2010).
Registration and Voting by Ethnicity for Naturalized and U.S.-Born U.S. Citizens, 2008 (in percentages)
Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2009, Table 13).
Registration and Voting by Region of Origin for Naturalized Citizens, 2008 (in percentages)
Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2009, Table 13).
Rates of registration and voting among the two most rapidly growing segments of the naturalized population in the United States tell a somewhat more positive story about the effects of naturalization on electoral participation. Naturalized Asian American and Latino citizens are more likely to register and vote than are their U.S.-born co-ethnics. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2009), 49% of naturalized Asian Americans and 54% of naturalized Latinos voted in 2004 compared to 45% of U.S.-born Asian Americans and 48% of U.S.-born Latinos.
These higher voter turnout rates among naturalized Asian Americans and Latinos should be seen in context; turnout for these two groups, regardless of nativity, is lower than for non-Hispanic Whites and Blacks. The higher turnout rates among the naturalized reflect the unintended positive effects of the politicization of immigrant status in the United States in the past 2 decades and of targeted mobilization efforts in immigrant communities that spur both naturalization and voting (Barreto & Woods, 2005; Chávez, 2008; Pantoja, Ramírez, & Segura, 2001). Naturalized Latinos did not always have higher turnout rates than U.S.-born Latinos, and the patterns shown in these 2008 data, which also appeared in 2000 and 2004, could reverse (DeSipio, 1996b). Should naturalized Asian Americans and Latinos continue to vote at higher rates than the native born in the next several national elections and pass these high turnout rates on to their children, however, they will likely lead a reverse in the pattern of lower turnout among Latinos and Asian Americans relative to the non-Hispanic White population. A change along these lines would significantly improve political opportunities not only for Latino and Asian immigrants but for these ethnic populations as a whole. They would also be likely to improve the prospects of the Democrats in national elections and in states that are now competitive, a prospect that some Republican leaders, although not the rank and file, fear greatly (Kirkorian, 2009).
There is no national data source that identifies the partisan preferences of naturalized citizen voters in the United States. Instead, data on the partisan preferences of the larger ethnic population can be used as a surrogate. In 2008, naturalized citizens made up 28% of all Latino voters and 64% of Asian American voters (U.S. Census Bureau, 2009). The preponderance of survey evidence shows that naturalized-citizen Asian Americans and Latinos share partisan and issue preferences with their U.S.-born co-ethnics (Lien et al., 2004; author’s analysis of Fraga et al., 2006; DeSipio & Uhlaner, 2007).
Latinos have long been a reliable Democratic electorate (see Table 5). Asian Americans, on the other hand, have shifted from a reliably Republican electorate to a reliably Democratic electorate as immigrants have made up an increasing share of the Asian American electorate. In 1992, 31% of Asian American voters supported Democrat Bill Clinton. Clinton increased this Asian American support to 43% in 1996, and Al Gore further increased it to 54% in 2000 (The New York Times, 2008).
National Exit Poll Data by Race-Ethnicity, 1972 to 2008 (in percentages)
Source: The New York Times (2008).
Note: The 2004 result for Latinos is widely disputed by scholars of Latino politics. That said, other estimates show that George Bush did increase his share of Latino votes in 2004 relative to 2000. There are no New York Times exit poll data on Latinos for 1976, nor are there exit poll data on Asian Americans prior to 1992.
Survey-based evidence indicates that this Democratic partisanship extends to non-naturalized Asian American and Latino immigrants as well (Lien et al., 2004, chap. 4; author’s analysis of Fraga et al., 2006). These populations, however, have a higher share who do not report an attachment to either party and who, arguably, would be more responsive to mobilization from either party.
Why is this the case? In the past 15 yeas, the Republican party and candidates seeking the Republican nomination for national, state, and local offices have increasingly taken strongly anti-immigration and anti-immigrant positions and used immigration as a tool to mobilize non-Hispanic White voters concerned about the changes that immigrants are perceived to bring to U.S. society (Wroe, 2008). Frequently, the strategy has paid off in the short term, with the candidate who takes the more nativist position being able to use that position to turn out voters who might not otherwise vote. Republican leaders in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives further weakened immigrant support for the party by pushing the legislation discussed above to criminalize unauthorized status in the United States and, more generally, to oppose comprehensive immigration reform that includes paths to legalization for unauthorized immigrants resident in the United States. Although Democrats have far from consistently advocated on behalf of immigrants, the party is more likely to take pro-immigrant positions of the two parties, and it includes a higher share of naturalized citizens and their co-ethnics in elective and other leadership positions. The Republicans, then, have steadily diminished their appeal among immigrant and ethnic electorates in the United States in the past 15 years.
The political impact of this strong Democrat preference among naturalized U.S. citizens is reinforced by the growth in the size of the immigrant vote. In 2008, more than 8.3 million naturalized U.S. citizens turned out to vote (U.S. Census Bureau, 2009, Table 13). Although they made up a small share of the national electorate (approximately 6.3%), immigrant voters tend to be concentrated in a handful of states, including at least one of the electoral college “battleground” states—Florida. The naturalized-citizen vote is also growing more rapidly than that of the native-born population. The pool of naturalized-citizen adults numbered 15.4 million in 2008, an increase of 17.6% since 2004. The number of native-born adults in 2004 grew by only 3.7% since 2000 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005).
These patterns of change also appear in the Latino and Asian American adult U.S. citizen populations (which include both U.S.-born and naturalized citizens). The size of the Latino adult U.S. citizen population grew by 21.4% and the Asian American adult U.S. citizen population by 12.6% between 2004 and 2008. Non-Hispanic White adult U.S. citizens, on the other hand, saw an increase of just 2.1% in this period.
There are certainly exceptions to the pattern of immigrant support for the Democrats. Cuban American voters in South Florida and Vietnamese voters in Southern California have traditionally supported Republican candidates in national elections. These patterns remained in 2008, although there is evidence that south Florida Cuban American voters reduced their traditional support for the Republicans marginally (Lakshmanan, 2008). These exceptions notwithstanding, the growth of the immigrant and ethnic vote and its solid Democratic partisanship serve as a resource for the Democrats in coming elections and make the rebuilding efforts that the Republicans face after the 2008 elections more difficult.
Numbers, of course, do not guarantee that immigrants will be able to regularly elect the candidates of their choice or influence public policy to meet their needs. That will require not just numbers but also the tactical use of those numbers and alliances with others in the electorate who share public policy goals with immigrants. The most obvious alliance partner is U.S.-born co-ethnics. As I have suggested, immigrants already share partisan and policy preferences with their co-ethnics. Much that unites ethnic populations across nativities also created opportunities for cross-ethnic or cross-racial alliances on specific policy needs (Segura & Bowler, 2005). Latinos and African Americans, for example, share a class position in U.S. society and, more than other groups in U.S. society, see a need for government to increase its role in supporting public education, providing social services, and ensuring expansion of the economy and the workforce. Latinos and Asian Americans share policy needs in immigration, immigrant incorporation, and protection of language rights. Latinos, Asian Americans, and Blacks share a concern with governmental protection of civil rights, although the exact boundaries of this vary for each community. These shared policy interests by no means guarantee that alliances will form across racial and ethnic lines, or with like-minded non-Hispanic Whites, but they create opportunities for leaders to mobilize the power of the growing immigrant vote. Competition between the groups for limited resources—particularly, resources provided by local governments—will continually challenge these efforts.
Thus, the potential exists for immigrants and their U.S.-born co-ethnics to influence political outcomes while their numbers remain small. This direct influence is beginning to be felt. Perhaps the most dramatic example is the election of Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor of Los Angeles in 2005. Villaraigosa had run for the office before, in 2001, and lost to the same candidate that he beat in 2005 (James Hahn, an Anglo candidate who had a long family history of public service in Los Angeles). What changed between 2001 and 2005? Villaraigosa was able to hold onto the very high share of Latino votes (naturalized and U.S.-born Latinos) that he had won in 2001 but also split the White and African American vote with Hahn (Barreto, Guerra, Marks, Nuño, & Woods, 2007). This relatively even division of the White and Black votes was a considerable improvement for Villaraigosa compared with his 2001 showing. He was particularly effective in winning the votes of African Americans ages 40 and younger. Villaraigosa’s election, then, was a victory for Latinos and for Latino immigrants but a victory that would not have been possible without successful alliances with other racial and ethnic groups. He was successful in reaching these electorates by offering a vision of Los Angeles’s future that was closer to their own than was that of Jim Hahn, particularly regarding educational policy. This model of coalition politics based on shared interests reflects the core reality of immigrant electoral politics in the United States. Despite their growing numbers, immigrants will be a minority in most electorates.
At the national level, the immediate test of immigrant political voice will be seen in efforts to enact comprehensive immigration reform. Such a bill, if passed, would speed the opportunity for immigrant political incorporation in the United States. Concerns about their growing political voice by some in the majority population plays a significant part in opposition to a comprehensive bill (as opposed to immigration “reform” that focuses simply on new enforcement strategies). Advocacy for such a bill in Congress will include few immigrants, so the debates will reflect alliances and shared interests more than a direct ability of immigrants to shape policy. There are certainly many reasons to support a comprehensive reform that includes legalization for undocumented immigrants resident in the United States; one that does reflect the growing electoral power of immigrants is a recognition that they will be significantly more influential in the near future and that it would be unwise to alienate them now by further excluding the undocumented or by demonizing immigrants as a whole.
Immigrants and Their Co-Ethnics in Elective Office
As immigrant populations grow in the coming years and a larger share of immigrants naturalize, the number of ethnic officeholders will likely increase. What is unique in the U.S. case is that this growth in office holding can precede citizenship and immigrant ethnic electoral empowerment. The VRA of 1965, and more importantly, the 1982 amendments to the VRA, ensure that concentrated minority communities will be able to elect candidates of their choice to elective office (Epstein, Pildes, de la Garza, & O’Halloran 2006; Henderson, 2007). The statutory guarantee of “majority-minority” districts in areas of racial or ethnic group concentration and the enforcement of these statutory guarantees by the U.S. Justice Department and the federal courts ensure that the redistricting that follows the decennial census expands the number of minority officeholders.
Districts are drawn on the basis of the whole number of persons, not the number of citizens or citizen adults. Consequently, concentrated immigrant populations create the population base from which minority districts can be drawn. The citizen-voters who live in the same areas as these immigrants, who are often U.S. citizen co-ethnics of the immigrants, then have the opportunity to elect the candidates of their choice, who themselves are often co-ethnics. The VRA does not cover all immigrant and ethnic populations but instead those who had experienced multigenerational exclusion, often based on language: Asian Americans and Latinos. In addition, the VRA protects nonimmigrant populations who had experienced multigenerational exclusion based on race: African Americans, Native Americans, and Alaskan Natives.
Although there is little research on this question, it would appear than U.S.-born descendants of immigrants (what I am calling co-ethnics here) are more likely to seize these opportunities for elective office than are naturalized U.S. citizens. There are no reliable data on foreign-born U.S. officeholders nationally. For some positions, it is relatively easy to measure this phenomenon. In the current Congress, for example, no U.S. Senators are naturalized U.S. citizens. Two, John McCain (AZ) and Michael Bennet (CO), were born abroad to U.S.-citizen parents and were, consequently, U.S. citizens by birth. Eight members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1.8% of the membership, are naturalized U.S. citizens. In the previous Congress, one naturalized U.S. citizen served (Mel Martinez [FL]) as did seven members of the U.S. House of Representatives (1.6% of the membership). In 2010, two governors were naturalized U.S. citizens (Jennifer Granholm [D-MI] and Arnold Schwarzenegger [R-CA]). Neither of these immigrant officeholders is likely to be replaced by another immigrant officeholder. At other levels of office, it is very difficult to collect this sort of data. Even in areas of high immigrant concentration, officeholders rarely use their officeholder biographies on government websites to indicate their nativity. I think it safe to say that, like the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, only a small share of U.S. officeholders are naturalized U.S. citizens.
The levels of co-ethnic office holding are considerably easier to document. Since 1984, the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO) has counted Latino officeholders nationally. The latest enumeration, from 2007, finds 5,129 Hispanic officeholders nationally. Although this is a small share of the more than 600,000 officeholders nationally, Latinos’ share of officeholders is considerably greater in the nine states where Latinos are concentrated (NALEO, 2008). Latinos made up 3% of state legislators nationwide in 2009 (National Council of State Legislatures [NCSL], 2009a). Asian American officeholders numbered approximately 2,000 in 2007 (University of California, Los Angeles, Asian American Studies Center, 2007); Asian Americans made up approximately 1% of state legislators in this period (NCSL, 2009b). These numbers will undoubtedly grow after the 2010 census, an increase that can be attributed in part to the residential concentration of non-naturalized immigrants from Latin America and Asia.
Transnational Engagement
Finally, immigrants participate civically and politically in the politics of their country of origin, which sometimes confounds popular understandings of the adaptation of immigrants to the civic and political life of their new countries of residence. Some immigrants and a smaller share of their children maintain community, civic, and/or political ties to their countries of origin (Basch, Glick Schiller, & Blanc-Szanton, 1994; Smith, 2006). The connections, broadly labeled “transnational,” have long been a part of the lived lives of immigrants (Smith and Guarnizo, 1999; Foner, 2001; Morawska, 2001). In the contemporary era, however, the desire that many immigrants have long expressed to maintain these ties have become easier to implement. Both telecommunications and travel are now relatively inexpensive in historical terms, and this allows immigrants who desire an ongoing civic and political connection to their communities or countries of origin to establish or maintain these ties. Equally importantly, the governments of some immigrant-sending countries are investing resources and offering benefits to immigrants seeking to be transnationally involved and groups seeking to develop transnational networks.
That transnational engagement has always been a civic and political resource for immigrants does not reduce the concern that some in immigrant-receiving societies express about this engagement. Many in receiving societies fear that this engagement will, at a minimum, slow or stop the process of immigrant adaptation to the new society and add to social tumult. In a more extreme form, critics of transnational engagement fear that transnationally engaged immigrants will act as a destabilizing force on the politics of the new home and act as an agent of the sending country’s government. These concerns are particularly amplified when the number of immigrants from a sending country is large and it shares a border with the receiving society (Huntington, 2004; Renshon, 2005).
In the U.S. case, these fears are unsubstantiated. A minority of immigrants are engaged in transnational activities, and those who are participate much more in cultural activities than civic or political ones. A 2002 survey of immigrants from three of the four largest Latin American and Caribbean migrant-sending countries, for example, found that no more than one in five Latino immigrants had either participated in the politics of their countries of origin since migration to the United States or participated in country-of-origin-focused civic activities in the past year (DeSipio, 2003). Some countries of origin see higher levels of transnational engagement than others. Both in this study and in other analyses of Latino migrants, Dominicans are more likely than Mexican or Central American immigrants to be transnationally engaged (Guarnizo, Portes, & Haller 2003; DeSipio and Pantoja, 2007; Portes, Escobar, & Radford 2007).
There are fewer cross-national studies of transnational engagement in Asian American immigrant communities than among Latinos. Regardless, similar patterns emerge. The minority of Asian American immigrants are engaged in the politics of their countries of origin, although the shares of the population so engaged are somewhat higher than for Latinos (Lien et al., 2004). A 2000-2001 survey of Asian Americans (which included immigrants and well as U.S.-born Asian Americans) found that between 20% (Japanese Americans) and 52% (South Asians) were politically engaged in their countries of origin. Among the largest Asian American populations, 33% of Chinese Americans, 36% of Korean Americans, and 44% of Filipino Americans were politically active in the country of origin.
Regardless of the type of transnational activity, Latino immigrants who are transnationally engaged are more likely to be involved in U.S. civic and political activities than are non-transnationally engaged immigrants. Transnationally engaged Latinos who are involved in organizations focusing on the country of origin are more likely to be involved in U.S.-focused organizations in multivariate models that control for other factors (DeSipio, 2006). The number of transnational organizations an immigrant participates in shapes the degree to which transnationally engaged immigrants are engaged in U.S. politics. Being a member of one transnational organization, for example, has no effect in multivariate models on the likelihood of participating in U.S. electoral politics. Immigrants who are members of two or more such organizations, however, are considerably more likely to participate in U.S. politics relative to Latino immigrants who are not members of any such organizations (DeSipio, 2003, Appendix 2).
The 2000-2001 survey of Asian Americans finds similar patterns. Asian American immigrants who reported political engagement in their countries of origin were more likely than comparably situated immigrants who were not politically engaged to participate in U.S. politics in forms other than voting (activities that non-U.S. citizens can participate in equally to the naturalized). This positive impact of home country political engagement remains in multivariate statistical models that control for the effects of socioeconomic status, political engagement, civic involvement and mobilization, acculturation and racial group concerns, region, national origin group, and other migration-related variables (Lien et al., 2004, pp. 158-160). Transnationally engaged Asian Americans are also more likely to reported that they are registered to vote and that they voted than did those who were not transnationally engaged (Lien et al., 2004, pp. 160-164).
Regardless of one’s assessment of whether the reported levels of transnational engagement among immigrants to the United States are high or low, the phenomenon diminishes considerably among the children of immigrants (the second generation) and disappears almost entirely in subsequent generations (de la Garza & DeSipio, 1998). A 2004 study of the children of immigrants in the Los Angeles area found low rates of participation in organizations focused on the immigrant parents’ country of origin. Among young adult immigrants who migrated to the United States as children (the “1.5 generation”), fewer than 10% became members of such organizations as adults. Participation was particularly low among Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Chinese immigrants (between 2.2% and 3.7%). Participation rates are equally low among the adult children of immigrants who themselves were born in the United States (the “second generation”). Membership in organizations focused on the parents’ country of origin ranged from a low of 5.9% among the Vietnamese American second generation to a high of 17.8% of Filipino American second-generation immigrants. Fewer than 8% of Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Chinese second-generation immigrants were involved in home country–focused organizations (Rumbaut et al., 2004, 2006).
Over time, the newly emerging transnational organizations could offer a new path to immigrant incorporation. For this to happen, they would need to continue to expand, consequently including a larger share of immigrants (and, perhaps, their children) within their organizational net. They would also need to steadily speak to a wider range of the concerns of their memberships, including U.S.-focused issues as well as those focused on the home community or country. This will undoubtedly happen if the organizations are to remain active. The evidence presented here demonstrates that immigrants steadily do begin to focus on the civic and political life of the United States, so the continued viability of these new organizations will require such a transition (Eckstein, 2009). The question that must remain unanswered at this writing is whether that transition will occur rapidly enough to hold on to the membership that they currently have and whether these organizations will be able to develop alliances with more domestically focused organizations as they did in regard to the 2005 House of Representatives immigration bill so that they can show tangible benefits of organizational participation to their members.
Conclusions
Immigrants to the United States and Canada continue to refresh each nation’s democracy as they have from the nation’s earliest days. Immigrants and, particularly, naturalizing citizens in each country share national political values with the native born and seek incorporation as equal members. In these patterns, immigrants in the two countries are peas in a pod. When the focus shifts, however, to mechanisms of immigrant incorporation, the differences between the two nations become more evident. Structural barriers to immigrant participation at parity with their share of the population appear much more in the U.S. case than in the Canadian. The effect of these barriers in the United States will expand in the coming years as the number of immigrants grows, making the immigrant incorporation gap between the U.S. and Canada even greater.
So as not to offer too pessimistic a reading of the U.S. case, it is important to note that even without additional civic, community, and electoral organization, immigrant participation in civic and community politics will grow as the number of immigrants with longer periods of residence in the United States increases. Immigration leading to permanent residence alone adds 800,000 to 1 million new people each year, so these numbers will grow for the foreseeable future. Immigrants are naturalizing at higher rates, ensuring that the share of foreign-born U.S. citizens will grow. This will slowly change the composition of the national electorate and more quickly shape electoral coalitions in areas with high concentrations of immigrants.
Numbers alone do not guarantee the incorporation of immigrants in the United States. Naturalization is a formal barrier all immigrant receiving states impose prior to granting immigrants full political rights. State investment can help immigrants overcome this barrier, as the Canadian government does, or rely on civil society and individual resources to overcome these barriers, as the United States does.
The United States faces an additional barrier to immigrant incorporation relative to Canada. Increasingly, many immigrants migrate in statuses that do not provide a route to citizenship. Their opportunities for incorporation will be shaped by the ongoing debates about immigration reform and the opportunities created for legalization.
Regardless of legal status, immigrants tend to be less likely those born in the United States to participate in civic and community politics and, when naturalized, to vote. The barrier is not just immigrant status (although the lack of experience immigrants have with U.S. political institutions undoubtedly contributes to this pattern) but also the compositional characteristics of immigrant communities and the low level of mobilization by electoral institutions of people in the United States with the characteristics like those of many immigrants. As a result, U.S. immigrant political participation should be understood more in terms of its potential than its current influence, a significant difference from Canada. Previous generations of U.S. immigrants saw more rapid political incorporation at least at the local level in large part because of a rich community-level infrastructure of civic organizations. This infrastructure has long been in decline, and immigrants are among the most consequential victims in U.S. society.
What will it take to mobilize the U.S. immigrant political voice? As the U.S. immigrant rights marches demonstrate, issues central to the immigrant experience are important. Leadership is also very important, to educate immigrants both on issues facing them as a group and on how they can mobilize their greatest asset—their numbers—to influence policy outcomes on those issues. Leadership is also critical to ensure that immigrants interested in naturalization can achieve their goals. Unfortunately, this community-level leadership is often absent. Community organizations and elected officeholders who could provide this leadership often focus their energies on individuals and groups who have demonstrated in the past that they will respond to mobilization, such as people who regularly turn out to vote in elections or regularly contribute time or money to political causes. It is for this reason that the newly emerging transnational activity among immigrants is so exciting. These are new organizations that are creating new leaders. Since their organizing focus is so centrally fixed on immigrant communities, it is likely that they will increase the volume and quality of community organizing among immigrants. Over time, this organizing will undoubtedly come to focus not just on the community or country of origin but also on the communities in which immigrants are living in their countries of destination. Transnational organizing is more common in the United States than in Canada, so to the extent that it does offer a new avenue to incorporation, U.S. immigrants have a relative advantage to those in Canada.
Ultimately, the story of immigrant political participation cannot be limited to immigrants. The barriers that have been discussed here ensure that even in the most optimal of environments, the immigrant political voice will not be commensurate with its numbers. It is the children of immigrants who are the test of the success of immigrant-receiving democracies in incorporating immigrants. The children of immigrants born in the country of migration often have an easier path to citizenship (or, in countries such as the United States and Canada, citizenship at birth). They also have a political socialization comparable to the children of the native population through public education. Frequently, they are more comfortable in the language of the country of migration than in the language of their parents’ country of birth. They do face a barrier that the children of the native population do not; many grow up in households where the parents cannot participate in some forms of politics and, consequently, may not discuss politics as much as children in households with native-born parents. To the extent that political incorporation occurs more quickly for Canadian immigrants, they are able to pass on the benefits of this incorporation more fully to their Canadian-born children than are many immigrants to the United States to their U.S.-born children. Thus, the apples-and-oranges nature of the different mechanisms of immigrant incorporation in Canada and the United States are likely to continue to shape the nations’ political environments well into the lives of the children of toady’s immigrants.
Footnotes
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.