FORT LAUDERDALE, FL – Macollvie Jean-Francois, Sun Sentinel reporter.

It’s an overcast, slightly chilly, dry day in South Florida: perfect voting weather, if the experts are correct.

Lines at precincts in the Fort Lauderdale area were long earlier in the day, when polls opened at 7 a.m. They have been moving, and speeding up as the morning progresses. The average wait has been about one to one and a half hours.

Cateline Hjardemaal, who is pregnant, said in Miramar she spent only about fifteen minutes in line, until poll workers noticed her jutting tummy.

“It was easy,” Hjardemaal, a Haitian-American, said. “I need a change. I hope [government programs] will be back to the way they were before. Today, everything is about cutting. They cut, cut everything.”

Voting in Harlem, by CarbonNYC/Flickr

NEW YORK – Aswini Anburajan, FI2W Reporter

Keith Shaka Daway is “sixty and a few months.” Originally from Trinidad, he says today is a chance to “vindicate” all his “ancestors” and the “freedom fighters” who have gone before him.

“Nat Turner, John Brown, and aaaaallll of ’em. I’m pulling that lever just for them, not for me,” he said, standing in line to vote at Madison Avenue and 120th street. “It’s a vindication because Barack Obama has sparked something international.”

“All those abolitionists and all the Quakers,” Daway continued, would feel that what they worked for had come to fruition.

On the reaction in Trinidad to a potential Obama victory?

“It’s carnival,” Daway laughed. “Backin’ up’n dancing, it’s music in the streets, rum-drinking, partying for at least seventy hours.”

NEW YORK, By Aswini Anburajan, FI2W Reporter

Carmen Garcia came prepared for the long wait at the polls today. She and her husband brought metal folding chairs in anticipation of the long lines.

Every five or ten minutes, the older couple from Puerto Rico, get up and carry their chairs a few feet further.

They won’t say who they’re voting for.

“It’s a secret,” Carmen insists. But she does say that she hopes change is coming.

The Garcias aren’t the only ones who brought chairs. Voters are bracing themselves for the wait, talking on their cell phones and introducing themselves to each other.

NEW YORK – By Aswini Anburajan, FI2W Reporter

Sadekh is an immigrant from Senegal. Standing in a line to vote in Harlem’s Little Senegal on 116th St. and Fifth Avenue –a line that’s down the block and represents about a two-hour wait– he is adamant that he’s not voting for Obama because he’s black.

He won’t give me his last name or let me record the interview but he says that he’s been voting for the past sixteen years.

“If I’m just voting for Obama because he’s black,” he asks rhetorically, “how did I vote for all these white guys?”

He says it will take more than just Obama’s getting into office to change world attitudes about the U.S.  His comments are in stark contrast to those of many of the voters around him, who say that the world will see the U.S. very differently if Obama is elected.

Still, black voters –both African immigrants and African Americans– do say that they never thought this day would come.

Gloria Mackey, a long time Harlem resident turned around to ask this reporter indignantly, “How do you think I feel?” when asked what she thought about voting for an African American.

“I marched in Selma. I marched on Washington,” she said.

A voter came out of the polls and walked past the long line and said, “It’s a two hour wait.”

“That’s all. That’s nothing,” Mackey said. She’d already been waiting a long time.

By Feet in Two Worlds reporter Aswini Anburajan

Of all the questions and fascinating possibilities raised by the 2008 election, one of the least pondered has been this: Will immigrants and ethnic minorities as a whole ever find a home in the Republican Party?

To put it another way, will the Republican Party embrace minority voters? Or do the desires of these voters and the GOP platform differ too widely to build a relationship between the two?

Here’s why this question matters: demographics. By 2050 the United States will be a majority minority nation, per projections by the Census Bureau. The impact of that demographic shift is already being felt politically, most significantly in the West where Latino voters have allowed Democrats a chance to win in states where they have struggled to be competitive in recent presidential elections.

A study from the William C. Velasquez Institute found that without Latino support in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, Obama’s lead in those states would either disappear or fall within the margin of error.

Latinos and Asians, especially those who are immigrants or the children of immigrants, are either solidly Democratic or trending that way. Newly naturalized voters are also voting Democratic. In this election that might make sense for several reasons: immigrant voters want change. Many voters, who aren’t white, also feel a kinship with Barack Obama. The closest we’ve come to such an ethnic identification may be John F. Kennedy and Irish Americans in the sixties.

But what about future elections? Will these voters be voting Democratic in 2010 and 2012 too?

The answer is most likely yes, for three reasons. First, and most important, is the problem minority voters have with the Republican brand. Republican opposition to immigration reform and movements like the Minute Men have reinforced the idea that the GOP is hostile to voters who aren’t white.

The second reason these voters may continue to vote Democratic is because the Democratic Party reached out to them in 2006 and again in 2008. The Obama Campaign in particular has focused on creating a grassroots army of Latino voters in the West, and has well-coordinated fund-raising programs throughout the country with Asian donors, many of whom are immigrants or the children of immigrants. These voters have now participated – and will most likely continue to participate – by running for office, working on future campaigns, and lobbying for their issues. If Democrats continue to be open to these voters and the issues they care for, then it’s likely that they will continue to vote Democratic.

Third, a study by the Immigration Policy Center says that children of immigrants will be a crucial voting bloc, not just in this election, but in future elections as well. Many of these children were born in the United States to undocumented parents. Their political identity, for better or for worse, may be shaped by what happens to their parents and their legal status.

It was reported in the past month that conservatives, regardless of who wins the White House, are planning a strategic retreat in Virginia after the election to decide on the future of a party that has already been badly damaged. The goal some conservatives have said is to see how the party can rebuild a national grassroots network in the way they did after the Carter victory.

But who will that new party and grassroots movement include?

A recent article by Pat Buchanan on RealClear Politics argued that with Democrats in control of the White House and Congress, they would pass immigration reform and flood the country with new citizens, all of whom would vote Democrat and leave regions, such as the West, completely out of reach of Republicans.

But perhaps Buchanan is suffering from a little inside –the-beltway myopia. The converse of that argument is that a flood of new citizens could provide both parties a pool of new voters to choose from. These voters, unlike those who have been born and raised in the United States, don’t have an ingrained party identification or set of stereotypes to associate with either Democrats or Republicans. This argument that was underscored by a recent survey of Indian American voters conducted by the Campaign for America’s Future.

Latinos were seen as Republican voters in 2004, won over by Republican outreach efforts that stressed a shared vision of the American dream and similar social values. Many Asian Americans also voted Republican, motivated by the desire for lower taxes and the message of personal responsibility. It’s only been in the past four years that these ethnic groups have made a significant shift to, or back to, the Democratic Party.

Rather than shy away from immigrant voters, the Republican Party, with its emphasis on conservative social values and the power of individual entrepreneurship, could win these voters over with the right arguments. In terms of sheer population their strength as a party may depend upon it. But they must be willing to demonstrate that the GOP is open to immigrants. Support for comprehensive immigration reform would be a step in that direction.

FORT LAUDERDALE, FL., NOV. 2 – By Macollvie Jean-François, Sun Sentinel reporter.

On the day elections officials said would break turnout records, Marie St. Fort stood in line around the corner from a North Miami library, squinting into a harsh afternoon sun. She was about 200th in line, waiting to vote early.

“Oh, I don’t care if it goes into the morning, I’ll stay right here,” St. Fort, 49, said. “I have to vote today. I have so many reasons to vote, I don’t know where to start.”

Like many others who showed up at crunch time, the Haitian-born mother of five said she had to get voting out of the way because she had too many errands to run Sunday —the last day to vote early in Florida— between attending church and other activities. As St. Fort shuffled along over two hours, campaigners came along, making last-ditch attempts to get their way with local amendments and even to give away free candy bars and lollipops. A local Haitian activist stopped by to see if anyone had any problems voting. One woman came bearing a tray of $1 hot dogs individually wrapped in foil.

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When it comes to politics, not all immigrants are created equal. While the 2008 presidential campaign saw intense efforts by both major candidates to seduce Hispanic voters, other ethnic groups did not receive comparable levels of attention.

But one thing foreign-born voters of all origins have in common is that they did not see the deep discussion many of them expected about what is going to happen to U.S. immigration laws under the next administration.

Immigration reform was more a political frisbee than a political football: rather than being tossed around by the campaigns, it sort of hovered over public discourse, dipping to ground level only on occasion. Most of the references to it came in front of immigrant audiences, especially in candidate interviews and commercials on Spanish-language media.

Hispanics received a lot of attention during this fall campaign because of their large numbers in four states once labeled battlegrounds: Colorado, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico. Now, the three western states are considered to be leaning towards Barack Obama — and the Democratic candidate held a slight lead in most of the polls conducted in Florida in October. This is in no small part due to the high levels of support Obama has attracted among Hispanics in those states.

While those states saw a deluge of advertising in Spanish, Latinos in other regions were not catered to in such an intense manner. Most Hispanics in the U.S. live in states considered safe for one party or the other –New York and California on the Democratic side, Texas in the Republican column.

Latinos in non-battleground states did not miss much.

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By Suman Raghunathan, Feet In 2 Worlds consultant

The Associated Press broke the story Friday that presidential candidate Barack Obama has a half-aunt, Zeituni Onyango, who, after her request for political asylum was rejected, is now undocumented and living in Boston.

The range of immigration statuses within Obama’s extended family reflects the reality of many immigrant families in the United States. Both Obama and his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, are US citizens; Soetoro-Ng is married to a Canadian citizen. And like many immigrants, Obama has a large extended family still living in Kenya, his father’s homeland.

Today, mixed-status families are extraordinarily common. For example, according to the Urban Institute, there are at least 5 million children in the country with at least one immigrant parent. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 3 million of these children have at least one parent who is undocumented.

During nearly two decades of historic migration to the US, in a period of extended economic growth powered in large part by immigrant labor, the number of Americans born to immigrant parents has risen steadily. The changes to the nation’s demographic make-up are dramatic. According to Pew, more than half or the growth in the US population in the last decade alone came from Latino communities, much of it due to recent immigrants and their children.

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