Professional Documents
Culture Documents
psalazar9@satx.rr.com
POLITICO -Magazine
Most of those green card holders are already on a path to becoming citizens and voters, and
their politics skew Democratic. The White Houses Stand Stronger initiative, announced last
week, aims to remove barriers for permanent residents to apply for full citizenship, including
the right to vote. The White House and its partners are planning 70 outreach events in the first
week alone, as well as 200 naturalization ceremonies that will induct 36,000 new citizens over
the same period. The administration has also lowered other financial barriers to obtaining
citizenship, including accepting credit cards to pay the fee, and its considering further reducing
costs for those who have low incomes but make too much to have the fee waived completely.
More than 30 percent of the green card holders eligible to apply for citizenship are originally
from Mexico, according to federal data. Of the top 10 countries of origin, only two Canada
and the United Kingdom are not in Latin America or Asia. Conservatives have increasingly
been raising the alarm about legal immigration as a more imminent threat to Republican power
than any possible pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented people
living in the U.S.
Just last month, immigration hard-liner Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) called for reducing the
number of green cards issued each year, warning that the government is on track to allow 10
million new permanent residents into the country over the next 10 years. While his analysis
focused on what he considered the potential negative economic impacts, the political
implications were unsubtly telegraphed in the states cited to put the 10 million figure into
perspective: The new residents would be larger than populations of Iowa, New Hampshire,
and South Carolina combined.
2016
Those remarks will galvanize Hispanics, said Janet Murgua, head of the National Council of La
Raza, a strong backer of the administrations efforts on immigration.
Latinos are responding against this demonization in the most American of ways: immigrants
who are eligible are becoming citizens, she wrote in a recent blog post, and those who are
citizens are registering to vote. According to United States Citizenship and Immigration
Services, it takes an average of six months to complete the naturalization process.
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
Sarah Wheaton is a White House reporter for Politico.
Authors:
Sarah Wheaton
swheaton@politico.com
@swheaton
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/obama-citizenship-immigrants-naturalizationdemocrats-213810#ixzz3mO1kGzdD