Migration & Refugee Services Articles
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May 28, 2008
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- With a sour economy, a war in its sixth year, gas prices at record levels and good health care increasingly unattainable, voters have other priorities ahead of worries about illegal immigration, pollsters say.
A May voter survey found immigration to be voters' fifth biggest concern behind those other issues, with 7 percent citing it as their top issue.
The Battleground Poll by the Tarrance Group, Lake Research and George Washington University released in late May found the economy and jobs to be the top election priority for 23 percent of voters. That was followed by the Iraq War and gas/energy prices, at 15 percent each, and health care, cited by 9 percent. Falling below illegal immigration as priorities were concerns about terrorism and retirement/Social Security, with each cited by 6 percent.
Brian Nienaber, vice president of the Tarrance Group, a Washington political polling firm, said the heat on immigration as a political issue has been turned down significantly this year, now that the possibility of comprehensive immigration legislation is off the congressional table and the positions of the three leading presidential candidates on the topic aren't far apart from each other.
However, Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, said Latinos will be more influential than ever in November, driven largely by a huge influx of newly registered voters.
Vargas and Nienaber were panelists at the fifth annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference sponsored May 20 by Georgetown University's Law Center, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network and the Migration Policy Institute.
Many of those new voters first have to become citizens, creating a backlog of naturalization applications that Citizenship and Immigration Services is struggling to resolve.
Other speakers at the law and policy conference said the 460,000 naturalization applications received last July alone, shortly before a large increase in the application fee, amounted to more than two-thirds the number of applications submitted in all of 2006.
Vargas said a nationwide campaign to get Latino immigrants to become citizens and register to vote and a current effort to encourage voting are showing results in presidential primaries. More than a million new voters were registered between January and October 2007 through the campaign, which was co-sponsored by Vargas' group, other Latino organizations and Hispanic media companies.
The recent attention to illegal immigration in public debate as well as the sharply increased and often highly visible enforcement in the last few years have driven many longtime U.S. residents to become naturalized citizens. That's important, he said, because naturalized citizens vote at a greater rate than do native-born citizens.
In seven of nine key primary states, Latino voters turned out in percentages higher than their proportion of the electorate, Vargas said. He gave the example of Florida and Nevada, where the turnout by Latino voters apparently accounted for the primary victories in those states of Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., respectively. "We intend to define this race in November," Vargas said.
Another speaker at the conference, Frank Sharry, director of a new immigration policy organization called America's Voice, predicted that a campaign "subplot" this year will be how candidates use Spanish-language media to try to reach those new voters.
Sharry predicted the campaign waged in Spanish will be quite different from what's seen in the mainstream English-language news media.
For example, Sharry said, McCain, who co-wrote the ill-fated comprehensive immigration bill last year, has distanced himself from that bill's approach, apparently as a way of trying to appeal to the GOP base that favors enforcement over broader ways of dealing with immigration problems.
But in Spanish-language media, Sharry predicted McCain will play up his sponsorship of last year's bill instead of his more recent emphasis on enforcement.
The Tarrance/Lake/George Washington survey of 1,018 voters conducted in mid-May had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent.
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