Wall Street Journal
October 10, 2006

Uphill Climb: Registering Hispanics to Vote

Despite Early Show of Political Clout, Little Has Been Done To Sign Up Immigrants For 2006

Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, says he was caught by surprise this year when organizers of pro-immigration rallies announced a goal of registering one million voters by 2008.

Mr. Gonzalez had planned to focus his modest $2 million budget just on getting people to vote. "We had to scrape around to find some resources" to set up voter-registration projects in 10 Sunbelt communities, he says. With most states cutting off registrations well before an election, "it's a sprint," he adds.

Four months after millions of Hispanics took to the streets to show their political clout, what is most striking is what hasn't happened: Community organizers say they have done little to register immigrants for the 2006 elections -- and face an uphill climb even for 2008.

Hispanic activism, energized by a national debate over cracking down on illegal immigration, caught groups that normally work to register voters off guard. The Arizona Coalition for Migrant Rights in Phoenix says it had been concentrating on naturalization and only recently began sending registration workers -- some of them high-school volunteers -- to college campuses and immigrant neighborhoods. So far, it says, it has registered 1,000 voters and may reach 8,000 by Election Day.

The hurdle of turning Hispanic numbers into Hispanic political clout remains high. Hispanics are the largest minority group in the U.S. and account for more than half of all foreign-born immigrants. But historically, most of them can't or don't file for citizenship, and most of those who do file don't vote. For example, during a recent week, 28,000 immigrants became citizens. If past patterns hold, 6,160 are Hispanic, and just 3,572 of them will register to vote.

The untapped potential means both political parties have much at stake in the immigration debate. The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, an advocacy group, estimates there are 9.4 million immigrants -- both Hispanic and non-Hispanic -- who are eligible to become citizens and vote. That is almost three times the popular-vote margin for President Bush in the 2004 election.

In a half-dozen swing states, the immigrant vote this year could be decisive for the party that can harness it. The Illinois Coalition says that in Florida, there are 870,000 potential votes among immigrants eligible to naturalize and their voting-age U.S.-born children. An additional 77,000 U.S.-born children of immigrants will be old enough to cast ballots in Florida in the 2008 election, it adds.

Democrats cornered the majority of the Hispanic vote in the past three presidential elections, but by a smaller margin each time. Most worrisome for Democrats, says NDN, a Democratic advocacy group, is that the fastest-growing part of the Hispanic community -- those who mainly speak Spanish -- has been most inclined to vote Republican.

Republicans' backing of a border fence and laws to criminalize illegal immigrants threatens that support. Young Hispanics, many of them U.S.-born, are especially energized by the immigration debate and "are there to be won over. They're upset about the message," says Rob Paral of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

It isn't just immigrant numbers that concern party operatives, either. As immigrants increasingly are moving to suburbs, small towns and the South, they could upend Republican strongholds if the immigration debate sours them on the president's party. In House Speaker Dennis Hastert's Illinois district -- dozens of small towns west of Chicago -- the Illinois Coalition calculates immigrants and their children account for 30% of the population, and the number of naturalized immigrants is up 60% in five years.

The national parties are precluded in many states from trying to register those new voters, but state parties say they are active. The Arizona Republican Party is paying its county organizations $10 for every voter they register by November. NDN, formerly the New Democratic Network, produced Spanish-language ads exhorting soccer-mad Hispanics to "Get in the game."

The most aggressive voter push, though, is likely to come from unions as well as from immigrant and community groups whose tax status requires them to be nonpartisan. After the spring rallies, many of those groups organized as the We Are America Alliance to deliver on the million-new-voters pledge, which they predict will cost up to $18 million.

So far, the alliance is putting together plans and starting to raise money, it says. With one of its first grants, it set up a text-messaging project that will help it spur immigrants through the citizenship and registration process. During a recent trial, the alliance says it sent text messages to 1,100 people asking if they were eligible to vote, got back 120 responses and is now forwarding them registration forms.

Other groups have launched "citizen workshops" to help immigrants process their paperwork and "democracy schools" to tutor them for the citizenship test. The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles says 2,500 people showed up for a naturalization workshop in July.

The Arizona Coalition says 60 people showed up for a recent seminar titled "How a bill becomes a law." Forty of them said they had taken part in spring immigration marches.

But it is far from clear that the spring rallies have yet had much effect on increasing citizenship and voter registration.

The Citizenship and Immigration Service says citizenship applications hit 120,000 in both May and June, but slumped to 98,000 in July, fewer than the same month a year earlier but up from two years ago.

Voter registration is generally done by counties or cities, which don't ask about race or ethnicity, and isn't tabulated nationally until well after each election. In a spot survey, the Associated Press found registrations are up in most cities compared with 2005 -- which is to be expected because of the coming elections. But they are lower than in 2004 -- which also is to be expected because of that year's close presidential race.