Immigration Law

ONE MILLION NEW CITIZENS COULD VOTE IN NOVEMBER

By Greg Siskind

Could jacking up the naturalization fee last year inadvertently cost the Republicans the White House? Last July, the White House nearly doubled the fees to naturalize. The unexpected consequence of this was causing a massive surge in applications from people who filed before the fee increase became effective. Public anger over announcements that USCIS would not naturalize most of these applicants until after the election appears to have forced USCIS to work the applications much more quickly and now an additional 1,000,000 voters may be going to the polls in November. Recent polls are showing that new immigrants are much more likely to be voting Democratic. With many of these voters in swing states that previously went for the GOP, could these new voters actually tip the scales in favor of the Democrats in November? And are these voters being underrepresented in opinion polls which tend to consider likely voters those who have voted in the past? Also, people with weaker English skills are less likely to want to take part in opinion polls and many immigrants are suspicious of people who call and asking them for whom they intend to vote. Will pollsters consider these issues and properly weight their samples?

Full post as published by Greg Siskind's Blog on August 17, 2008 (boomark / email).