Political parties are missing their chance with new immigrants
As the number of eligible immigrant voters rises in Pennsylvania, activists and academics are urging presidential campaigns, parties and election officials to do more to bring them into the political process in 2020.
In the meantime, grassroots groups are registering voters at naturalization ceremonies in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia while national organizations pour money into voter registration drives statewide targeting the new voting block.
The rise in immigrant electoral power was documented recently in a study by New American Economy, an advocacy group for “smart immigration policies” that found that between 2017 and 2018, the number of immigrants eligible to vote in Pennsylvania rose by 7.9% — equaling about 34,000 new voters.
That figure represents the amount of foreign-born immigrants in Pennsylvania who became eligible to vote either through naturalization or by turning 18, and nearly totals the number of votes that Donald Trump won the state by in 2016.
But to tap into that power takes registering them, then turning them out to the polls, and many stakeholders worry that immigrants are mostly left to themselves to navigate the complex landscape.
That’s what motivates groups like the Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition, which, among other things, works to mobilize the immigrant vote and chip away at the barriers they may face along the way.
Sundrop Carter, the organization’s executive director, said the coalition registered thousands of voters at naturalization ceremonies in 2019, and is nearing the 1,000 mark in Philadelphia alone in the first few months of this year. In Western Pennsylvania, the Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh handles the effort.
Though her group is nonpartisan and doesn’t track party affiliation, Ms. Carter said immigrants are paying very close attention to policies at the national level that impact their families.
“These are a highly motivated group of people to vote in their first election, but unfortunately, they are often uninformed and underengaged through the more traditional engagement avenues,” Ms. Carter said. “Campaigns rarely, if ever, reach out to new Americans because they have no vote history and are not going to show up as likely voters.”
In 2016, the voters they contacted turned out at a rate of about 66%, Ms. Carter said. Deeply engaging communities of color, in general, she said, is important because it gives them the chance to elect representatives who look more like them.
Ms. Carter said she often wonders why registering people to vote isn’t embedded in the citizenship process, or why people aren’t automatically registered upon high school graduation.
“If we weren’t at the ceremonies
in Philadelphia and if [the Bhutanese Community Association] wasn’t at ceremonies in Pittsburgh, it would be unlikely anyone would ask [immigrants] to register to vote,” Ms. Carter said.
The coalition calls voters who they’ve registered for the first year and ahead of their first election to make sure they know where to vote and where to find more information, Ms. Carter said.
The growing number of newly-eligible immigrant voters in Pennsylvania is “fairly sizable” and reflects an increasing level of naturalization, said Michael Jones-Correa, director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Immigration at the University of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Jones-Correa, who teaches and studies immigrant incorporation and political mobilization, said generally, campaigns and parties have done “pretty poorly” at mobilizing new immigrant voters because the usual strategy is to turn out voters who have already voted in an election.
That’s because with a tight electoral time frame, campaigns tend to mobilize “the easiest, most reachable voters first,” he said. Instead, they wait for immigrants to enter the system on their own.
“These voters are kind of a lost opportunity for parties in Pennsylvania,” Mr. Jones-Correa said.
While parties and campaigns can hire more bilingual staff members and translate their websites for multiple languages, state and county governments can offer bilingual directions on how to register to vote and allocate funds to registering new voters, Mr. Jones-Correa said.
“Pennsylvania’s immigrant voters are much more diverse,” Mr. Jones-Correa said. “That can make voter mobilization a bit tricky, because you’re not talking about just mobilizing among one language but multiple languages.”
It serves both parties to register and mobilize these voters, he said, because although Republicans assume that immigrants will all vote Democrat, that’s not what the research shows.
A study he co-authored in 2018 found that by a ratio of 2 to 1, new Latino voters, in particular, are young people coming of age rather than immigrants nationalizing. Naturalized Latinos, he wrote, are more conservative than young Latino voters are and hold more conservative positions on immigration, terrorism and gay marriage, as well as more favorable views of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
“Young voters, by contrast, were significantly more likely to call themselves liberals and to feel angry, sad, and afraid during the elections,” Mr. Jones-Correa and his coauthor wrote. “They were more likely to emphasize race and criminal justice issues, more likely to say they themselves have had encounters with law enforcement and more likely to say they have been treated unfairly by the police.”
Tyler Moran, director of The Immigration Hub, pointed out that immigrant voters may be focused on many different issues and not just solely immigration. However, while they care about health care and the economy, it’s “hard to hear those things when they’re being framed as criminals and a threat to the country.”
These new immigrant voters, and swing voters in general, would respond if Democrats articulated a real vision on immigration, Ms. Moran said, rather than ceding the issue to Mr. Trump.
“I think, sometimes, there’s a fear that Donald Trump wins when anyone talks about immigration,” Ms. Moran said, “but if you’ve seen polling, the research does not bear that out.”