Immigrant Advocates Turn Focus to Ballot Box
Aiming to transform street passions into political power, organizers of recent immigrant rights marches Tuesday announced a national campaign to produce 1 million new citizens and voters by the November mid-term elections.
The drive will "channel the unprecedented momentum of our previous marches into a targeted mass campaign for civic action," Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Gabino Zavala said at a news conference at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles.
Flanked by immigrant mothers holding white Mother's Day roses to symbolize their separation from families back home, Zavala said the campaign marked the immigrant movement's next step to press for legislation that would provide more visas to reunify families and legalize the nation's estimated 11.5 million undocumented migrants.
Since March, hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters have staged marches, rallies, school walkouts and a boycott of work and consumer spending across the nation in support of legalization and other changes.
On Tuesday, representatives of religious, labor and community groups announced that they would designate May 17 as a national lobbying day, sending immigrant advocates from around the nation to Washington and hundreds of thousands of postcards urging change.
In Los Angeles on that day, churches, union offices and community centers will be transformed into "immigrant justice action centers" to pass out citizenship applications, register voters and offer phones for voters to call their elected representatives. Voter registration stations would also be set up on the streets, organizers said.
The steps are timed to influence the shaping of an immigration bill, which could be produced by a conference committee of Senate and House members by the end of May.
Some activists predicted that the campaign would produce a new surge of Latino citizens -- and voters -- even greater than the wave that followed the 1994 passage of California's Proposition 187, which would have denied public benefits to illegal immigrants had it not been overturned by federal courts.
The number of legal residents who became U.S. citizens, for instance, more than doubled from 434,000 in 1994 to 1 million in 1996, according to Rosalind Gold of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund in Los Angeles. Among them, the share of Latinos grew from 27% in 1994 to 43% in 1996, she said.
