New York’s “Little Pakistan” was mostly ignored by the candidates and is largely unaware there’s an election happening today. What does it mean when an immigrant community does not participate in mainstream politics?
Hiram Monserrate, who was forced to resign from the NY State Senate after being convicted of attacking his girlfriend, is trying to stage a political comeback. Experts are not counting him out in his Primary race against Francisco Moya who has won numerous endorsements.
New York’s biggest Spanish language paper is hoping for fresh blood in the New York State legislature.
Over forty percent of first-time New York City voters in this presidential election were foreign born, according to a study released by the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC).
“Immigrants continue to swell the ranks of first-time voters in New York City and remain a driving force in the growth of the city’s electorate,” wrote the authors of the 2008 New Americans Exit Poll, professors Lorraine C. Minnite of Barnard College and John Mollenkopf, the director of the Graduate Center for Urban Studies at the City University of New York.
Immigrants were 41.1 percent of those voting for the first time. This continued a trend from the three previous presidential elections, when at least three in ten of immigrant voters were voting for the first time, according to the study.
Among foreign-born voters, a large proportion became citizens only recently. Nearly 18 percent achieved citizenship during the last two years, and an additional 25 percent had done so between 2000 and 2005.
The front page of last Sunday’s New York Times Metro section made much of the emergence of immigrants as an increasingly important voting bloc in New York City electoral politics, particularly with a view toward next year’s municipal elections.
The acknowlegment of immigrant voting power flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which has long said immigrants are not as engaged in US politics as those of their home countries.
According to the New Americans Exit Poll Project (conducted by Columbia University) and a recent analysis by CUNY’s Center for Urban Research, the number of immigrant voters is on the rise in New York City. What’s more, immigrants are responsible for much of the expansion of the city’s electorate.The CUNY study found at least a third of new voters added to the city’s voter rolls since 2004 were Russian, Chinese, Korean, or Muslim. These new faces and ethnicities in the city’s electorate join the roughly one million immigrants already registered to vote in New York.
According to the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), a nonpartisan immigrant advocacy group that registers new citizens to vote, over 265,000 immigrants have been added to the city’s voter rolls since 1996.In a city where City Council races are won and lost by a margin of 5,000 votes, this infusion of new voters puts a distinctly New York spin on the nation’s growing realization that immigrant voters are crucial to political races.