The Obama administration — in coinciding with Constitution and Citizenship Day — announced a citizenship awareness campaign to encourage nearly 9 million lawful permanent residents to apply for citizenship.
The “Stand Stronger” campaign is part of the New Americans Project created by the White House Task Force on New Americans, which is a direct product of President Obama’s 2014 executive actions on immigration.
The White House is working with business and nonprofit groups to launch more than 70 citizenship outreach events in the first week of the campaign, while the federal government plans to have 200 naturalization ceremonies across the country.
As can be expected, Republicans are already howling.
At the core of conservative fears is pushing those eligible for naturalization to undergo the citizenship process will result in more citizens and thus more people eligible to vote — whom Republicans fear will vote for Democrats.
It’s a strategy conservatives have long feared and long preached against, particularly when it comes to immigration reform. But ultimately Republicans have no one else to blame but themselves for their current predicament.
All work is done through relationships. And the current relationship the Republican Party has with the Latino community in the United States could not be more toxic.
The GOP found out the hard way of the importance of the Hispanic vote in 2012, when Mitt Romney’s best pitch to Latinos was his plan to make life so difficult for unauthorized immigrants — many of whom are Hispanic and have legal relatives in the United States — that they would self-deport. That year 71 percent of Latinos voted for Obama, the highest share of the Hispanic vote won by a Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1996, according to the Pew Research Center. Romney won only 27 percent.
Relative to the current rhetoric used by Republican candidates, Romney’s comments seem tame in comparison.
The rise of Donald Trump is a startling indicator of how the Republican base sees Latinos — and, more broadly — how they see immigrants.
To many Republicans, immigrants seem to pose an existential threat to the fabric of their version of America, despite our glaring history as a nation built by the same people they now seek to dehumanize and humiliate.
Rather than correct these attitudes, the GOP has seized them by launching an assault on the right to vote through bogus and absurd measures against virtually nonexistent voter fraud — making the right to vote as invaluable and precious as ever.
It’s all the more fitting that while some seek to disenfranchise a whole class of people, the Obama administration is seeking to help them start a new chapter of their lives in the greatest democracy in the world, while simultaneously strengthening it.
Latinos and other future Americans will remember who gave an open hand and who kept a clenched fist, whether conservatives like it or not.
edsalas@indiana.edu
