Advocates Try to Boost Immigrant Turnout

NEW YORK -- "Today we march! Tomorrow we vote!" It's been a popular slogan at recent immigration rights rallies, and now organizers are trying to make it reality. Advocates nationwide are aiming to boost low voter turnout among foreign-born citizens and to file naturalization papers for the millions who qualify for citizenship.

"How do we translate grass roots power into political power?" said Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. "We've always done voter work, but now we're turbocharged."

Many are focusing on next Monday, when dozens of planned rallies will include speeches, banners and fliers urging marchers to fill out voter registration forms on the spot.

Following that, organizers from San Francisco to Washington are devising elaborate projects to keep voters engaged through the November elections, then 2008 and beyond.

At a recent immigration rally in San Diego, organizers registered 5,000 new voters, said Jesse Diaz of the March 25 Coalition. Advocates throughout California are calling on the Spanish-language press to "help explain to them the importance of participating in the elections," Diaz said. "The whole tone of the movement has turned to voting."

Many undocumented immigrants _ who can't vote themselves _ are going door-to-door urging their family members, neighbors and co-workers to cast ballots, said Cecilia Munoz of the National Council of La Raza. The group is starting a new national voter project Wednesday called Leap to Action that will distribute voting fact sheets to hundreds of local nonprofits. Local radio and television ads also are in the works.

In the Chicago area, trained voting organizers will blanket 15 heavily immigrant neighborhoods, mostly Latino, for six months starting in July. The aim is to get 10,000 new voters registered by November, said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. He called it "immigration freedom summer."

"Anybody who looks at all these rallies has to be asking, 'What's the political impact?'" Hoyt said. "Some politicians are nervously wondering how many of these people voted in the past and how many will vote in the future."

There's room for growth. Among the estimated 41 million Latinos in the nation in 2004, 61 percent couldn't cast ballots because they were too young or were undocumented, the Pew Hispanic Center reported. Just 6 percent of U.S. voters in 2004 were Latino.

"The electoral process is sometimes so abstract, it doesn't feel relevant to people's everyday lives," said Clarissa Martinez de Castro, director of state and local public policy for (note trim) La Raza. "This debate has shown people how the political process does connect with and impact your daily lives."

Hong of the New York Immigrant Coalition predicts that naturalizations will spike, too.

Naturalization rates surged in the 1990s in California, according to a Public Policy Institute of California report, and a big reason was political events _ especially a 1994 state law that barred undocumented immigrants from public schools and most health care. It was never put in action because courts ruled it unconstitutional, but it angered many immigrants and got them politically engaged.