Lopez campaigns for Obama in Detroit (Photo: Freep.com|Detroit Free Press)

It was George Lopez doing the talking, but this time the punch line wasn’t funny.

“You cannot be happy with the last eight years,” the comedian said. “Do you like waking up everyday to banks closing?”

Lopez was speaking at a voter registration rally aimed at Detroit’s Hispanic community, held on Sept. 20, to discuss the important role Latinos will play in this year’s presidential election.

Polls in Michigan show Senators Barack Obama and John McCain in a statistical dead heat, with the Democrat enjoying a slight edge. The state is home to more than 400,000 Latinos, and Latinos make up only 4 percent of the electorate. But in an election that seems too close to call, they could decide which candidate wins Michigan’s 17 electoral votes.

Latino voters are the focus of much attention in the battleground states of New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Florida — but strategists are beginning to see that smaller burgeoning Hispanic communities in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio could have a hand in deciding the winner.

Latinos drove two and three hours to get a glimpse of the famous comedian and listen to what he had to say about his support for Obama.

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Pilar Marrero and Aswini Anburajan joined Brian Lehrer on Thursday (9/25/08) on WNYC, New York Public Radio to talk about the impact of mortgage foreclosures and the financial crisis on immigrants in the US. They also discussed how economic concerns may affect the election in battleground states like Nevada and Florida, which have large numbers of Latino voters.

Click here to listen to the segment.

In a piece that aired on Marketplace on Friday (9/26/08), Aswini Anburajan reports on the rising political influence of Indian Americans. During the presidential primaries, Indian American donors gave $5 million each to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and half a million dollars to John McCain. Now some of these Democratic voters are seeking to expand their national presence with a political action committee, the Indian American Leadership Initiative.

Listen to the full story on the Marketplace Web site.

Latinos are considered especially important as a voting population this year because it’s expected they’ll help decide whether four key battleground states go red or blue – Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, for a total of 46 electoral college votes.

Of those four, Florida is by far the most important, the mother of all battleground states, with 27 electoral votes. The Sunshine State gave the Democratic campaign some encouraging news over the weekend, when a new poll showed Sen. Barack Obama holding a slight lead over Republican Sen. John McCain among Hispanics in Florida. Polls already showed Obama ahead in the other three “Hispanic battleground states.” Overall, the new poll says, he leads McCain 2-to-1 among Latinos in swing states.

The Orlando Sentinel gave these details on the new poll by Newlink Research:

Of those surveyed in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio and Pennsylvania, 63 percent said they would vote for Obama, while 27 percent preferred McCain.

In Florida, 49 percent of Hispanics surveyed favored Obama to McCain’s 43 percent, and the margin of error is 3.75 percentage points. Newlink Research polled 684 likely voters in those key states.

Previous polls had given McCain a slight lead or called Florida a virtual tie, which seems to show it’s too early to make any definitive judgment on which direction Florida’s Latinos are going to lean. (more…)

Journalist Diego Graglia has been documenting the lives of Latinos during this presidential election year. He recently traveled from New York City to Mexico City, stopping along the way to talk to Latinos in small towns and big cities about the issues that matter to them. For more on La Ruta del Voto Latino/The Road to the Latino Vote visit www.newyorktomexico.com.

In a previous post, Diego Graglia wrote about his visit to New Orleans, where Hispanic Americans had long assimilated into the local mainstream culture, which in effect, made them “invisible.”

While in New Orleans, he interviewed Diane Schnell, news and marketing director of the local Telemundo station, KGLA-TV 42, which has recently launched the city’s first-ever Spanish-language newscast.

In this podcast, Diane talks about how the Latino community is no longer an invisible market in New Orleans, and which presidential candidate is doing more to reach out to New Orleans’ Latinos.

[audio:http://www.jocelyngonzales.net/FI2W/fi2w_laruta_diane.mp3]

Miami is sometimes half-jokingly called “the capital of Latin America,” for its concentration of Latin American expats, Latin American corporation headquarters and even vacation homes for the region’s richest. No wonder then that both Senators John McCain and Barack Obama opted to outline their potential foreign policy towards the region while campaigning in Florida last week. Both candidates gave interviews to Radio Caracol that made headlines, each in its own way.

The highlight of McCain’s appearance was his apparent confusion as to Spain’s location and who its prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is [you can listen to it here.] A story on the incident in The Sydney Morning Herald was headlined “The brain in McCain under strain about Spain.” However, a campaign advisor denied there was any confusion, which can only hurt Spanish pride.

In respect to Latin America, McCain expressed coldness for the more anti-American leftist leaders in the region and support for Mexico’s Felipe Calderón in his war against drug cartels.

Obama, in turn, projected a more empathetic stance towards the region, admitting that the U.S. “has been so obsessed with Iraq that we haven’t spent time focused on the situation in Latin America.” He also seemed to defend his position on a potential meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who the McCain camp featured in an attack ad on Spanish-language TV this week:

I think it’s important for us to not overreact to Chavez. I think what we have to do is just let Chavez know that we don’t want him exporting anti-American sentiment and causing trouble in the region, but that we are interested in having a respectful dialogue with everybody in Latin America in terms of figuring out how we can improve the day to day lives of people.

Most people in Latin America would agree that the U.S. has not paid attention to the region so far this century. A lot of them, however, would probably view that as a good thing. Most Latin Americans consider the much-disliked free-market economic policies of the ’90s known as the Washington Consensus to have been forced on the region by the U.S. and the multilateral organizations on which it generally exerts commanding control, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. (more…)

Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain have been going at each other’s throats in Spanish-language TV commercials on the issue of immigration. As we’ve reported through this week (here, here, here, here and here), the ads – and the candidate’s remarks to Latino audiences – were not always accurate or truthful — and the two candidates tend to talk about immigration only when speaking to Hispanics.

The New York Times has published a harsh editorial on the matter, in which it takes the two candidates to task for, “ignoring immigration,” and for, “lying about it to voters.”

The newspaper calls McCain’s charges that Obama helped kill immigration reform in the Senate, “a jaw-dropping distortion.” Then it calls Obama’s response, “just as fraudulent,” for portraying McCain as a friend of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh’s.

Then it goes on to say,

Immigration was broken before the candidates started this repugnant ad war, and looks as if it will stay that way for at least the duration of this campaign.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration keeps raiding factories and farms, terrorizing immigrant families while exposing horrific accounts of workplace abuses. Children toil in slaughterhouses; detainees languish in federal lockups, dying without decent medical care. Day laborers are harassed and robbed of wages. An ineffective border fence is behind schedule and millions over budget. Local enforcers drag citizens and legal residents into their nets, to the cheers of the Minutemen.

Both candidates once espoused smart, thoughtful positions for fixing the problem. But Mr. McCain is shuffling in step with his restrictionist party. Mr. Obama gave immigration one brief mention at the Democratic convention, in a litany of big-trouble issues, like abortion, guns and same-sex marriage, on which he seemed to say that the best Americans could hope for are small compromises and to agree to disagree.

As Feet in 2 Worlds has reported recently, the candidates haven’t been talking much about immigration policy. But according to a couple of new reports released this week in honor of National Citizenship Day (September 17), immigration and naturalization are very much on the minds of the nation’s newcomers – whether they can vote or not.

According to a new fact sheet [here’s the pdf file] issued this week by the Immigration Policy Center, nearly 1.4 million naturalization applications were filed in fiscal year 2007 – almost double the number filed in 2006.

What’s more, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS, the processing arm of the Department of Homeland Security), the number of people caught in the immigration processing backlog at the end of 2007 soared to 1.1 million people – a nearly 250% increase from the previous year. Though USCIS promises to process naturalization applications within 10 to 12 months of their filing, according to a recent report [pdf here] from the Office of Immigration Statistics, it’s doubtful all the immigrants waiting to become citizens will actually achieve citizenship in time to vote in this year’s election.

Processing times vary in different regions: the longest wait, USCIS says, is in Charlotte, NC, where by the end of this month it will take 14.9 months to process citizenship applications. Processing in Los Angeles and Miami is expected to take roughly one year; these two cities together accounted for nearly 20 per cent of new naturalized U.S. citizens last year.

The shortest processing time is five months, projected in 17 regions nationwide.

This means that someone in Charlotte who applied to become a U.S. citizen in July 2007 would probably not be able to do so by the end of this month, meaning they would not have been able to vote in the local primary elections last week. It’s also unlikely they would become a citizen in time to vote in the general election, as voter registration deadlines in some states are at least one month before the actual election. (Locally, a New York Immigration Coalition report says that nearly 60,000 immigrants in New York’s immigration backlog will be able to vote in November if USCIS keeps to its initial promise of a six-month processing time. The report goes on to say that New York has 126,000 cases mired in the immigration backlog.) (more…)

Latino outreach roared onto the front page of the mainstream media yesterday, after a new Spanish- language TV ad by Sen. Barack Obama accused John McCain of having “dos caras” or “two faces” when it comes to relations with Latinos.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry9LnAazwMg]

“They want us to forget the insults we’ve put up with, the intolerance,” an announcer says as a picture and quotes from conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh flash on screen saying, “stupid and unqualified Mexicans,” and, “shut your mouth or get out.”

“John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One tells lies just to get our vote and another, even worse, continues the failed policies of George Bush that put special interests ahead of working families,” the ad continues.

The ad had both the McCain campaign and Rush Limbaugh crying foul.

“Obama is now stoking racism in the country,” Limbaugh wrote in an e-mail to Politico‘s Jonathan Martin. “Obama is a disgrace – he wants the public to think he is Mr. Nice Guy while his thugs are in Alaska looking for dirt on Palin and he runs race-baiting ads and lies about what he has done and what McCain has done.”

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After Sen. John McCain campaigned across Florida earlier this week, Sen. Barack Obama arrives in the Sunshine State tomorrow. Recent polls show Obama either tied or several points behind his Republican rival.

Florida is not only the mother of all battleground states, but it’s also one of four key states where the Hispanic vote could help decide the election. The others are Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.

“Hispanics in Florida” has long been a synonym for Cubans. The state’s conservative Cuban-American vote has traditionally leaned Republican. But a recent poll by Florida-based Democratic pollster Bendixen & Associates puts Hispanics in the state, “about evenly divided,” between the two major candidates, according to Spanish newswire Agencia EFE. (In the other three “Latino battleground” states, Obama leads among Hispanics.)

This would seem to mirror the fact that Cubans are no longer a majority of Florida’s Hispanic voting population. Another Bendixen study says Cubans are 40 percent of the state’s 1.1 million Hispanic voters, while non-Cubans add up to 44 percent -this includes Dominicans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and people from other Latin American countries.

This diversification of the Latino population could give Obama some hope in a key state that has gone “red” in the last two presidential elections. Political scientist Luis Fraga of the University of Washington, an expert on Hispanic outreach in presidential elections, told the Austin American-Statesman that, “this growing Latino diversity and more second-generation Cubans — who vote Republican less consistently than their parents — combine to give Democrats a fighting chance in Florida,” Juan Castillo writes.

That’s probably one reason why McCain spoke at a Puerto Rican association in Orlando this week. The central Florida city has become a Puerto Rican stronghold over recent years -with many migrating there from New York and other places- and, again according to Bendixen, swing voters are a high percentage of this population.

This is how the Orlando Sentinel explained it:

Swing voters … are highly coveted this election because experts predict they will determine the presidential outcome in Florida, a key battleground.

In Central Florida, there are almost a quarter of a million swing voters, most of whom are Puerto Ricans or other Hispanics. Until now, they have remained a largely untapped resource. But both political campaigns are gearing up to target them during the next three months.

“There’s no more important voter in this media market than the Hispanic swing vote,” said pollster Sergio Bendixen, who prepared the most recent study on those Central Florida voters for Democracia USA, a group registering new Latino voters.

Journalist Diego Graglia has been documenting the lives of Latinos during this presidential election year. He recently traveled from New York City to Mexico City, stopping along the way to talk to Latinos in small towns and big cities about the issues that matter to them. For more on La Ruta del Voto Latino/The Road to the Latino Vote visit www.newyorktomexico.com.

New Orleans was Hispanic before being American, as street signs remind you in the French Quarter. Bourbon Street, no less, was named over two centuries ago after the royal family -last name Borbón- that still reigns over Spain.

Three years ago, after Hurricane Katrina, Latino workers poured into the city to help with clean up and rebuilding. But Hispanic Americans were in New Orleans long before that demographic explosion. The sense I got from talking to Latinos who’ve been there for many years, though, was that there was no real Latino community to speak of: no civic or cultural organizations, no newspapers, only one store where you could buy Latin American groceries!

“Before, we used to have one supermarket, two restaurants, the Honduran consulate, and that’s it,” says American-born Diane Schnell, the daughter of Honduran parents, who grew up in the city. “Now there’s ten or twelve supermarkets and the stores have tripled and quadrupled. There’s a Mexican consulate too.”

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