More immigrants applying to become citizens
Mike Madden
Gannett News Service
Feb 22, 2007
WASHINGTON — More immigrants applied to become U.S. citizens last year than any year since 1999, thanks largely to the national debate over border security and illegal immigration.
Government officials, advocates for immigrants and demographers said the increased applications mirrored a similar spike about a decade ago, the last time illegal immigration was so prominent in national politics.
Applications for citizenship increased more than 19 percent over the 2005 fiscal year, with 721,268 immigrants seeking to become naturalized in fiscal 2006, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials. A total of 696,020 new citizens were sworn in during 2006.
“Every time there's an immigration debate, there's always a big surge in applications for naturalization,” said Dan Kane, a spokesman for the agency. Immigration officials also have proposed higher fees for naturalization and other services, which may be pushing immigrants to apply before costs rise. Citizenship applications in the first quarter of this fiscal year are on pace to exceed last year's totals.
The immigration debate has spurred fears of a backlash against immigrants as well as a concerted effort by community organizations to encourage eligible foreigners to become citizens.
“Many of these people, they have been here for years and years,” said Reyna Polanco, an organizer with the Arizona Coalition for Migrant Rights, a group based in Phoenix that ran citizenship drives last year. “Some people, they came when they were two years old and they never decided to become American. ... With all these anti-immigrant propositions and all the proposals coming, they want to vote.”
Polanco's group and others that target Asian and African immigrants put their outreach efforts into overdrive last year as Congress debated sweeping changes to immigration laws. Organizers and immigrants were shocked in late 2005 when the House passed a bill that would have made it a felony to live in the United States without legal permission.
The sometimes ugly tone of the debate over illegal immigration — political ads played up the dangers of lax border security and state referendums restricted services to undocumented foreigners — led some immigrants to become citizens after years of living here with “green cards” as permanent legal residents.
“A lot of people felt that they didn't need to take that step to be considered a member of the community — a respectable, acceptable member of the community,” said Clarissa Martinez de Castro, director of state and local policy for the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino civil rights group. “People are getting shaken in their foundation of that belief.”
Government officials haven't published statistics on where the last year's new citizens came from. In previous years, most came from Mexico, China, India and the Philippines. State-by-state information on where the new citizens have settled will be available later this year.
Some analysts say the jump in citizenship applications could change the national political landscape — just as California's political landscape changed after 1994. That change occurred after a state law restricting services to undocumented immigrants led to an increase in citizenship applications.
“There is also a positive element to this whole dynamic, which is that the way that we can stop the demagogues and the reactionaries from insulting us on a daily basis on television is to become citizens, to register and to vote because that is what matters in a democracy,” said Sergio Bendixen, a Democratic pollster based in Miami who studies Latino public opinion.
Others doubted any new surge in Latino political action will result, but they still hailed the increase in citizenship applications.
