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…)

With the presidential candidates focused mainly on the threat of an economic collapse and Friday’s foreign policy debate, other campaign issues are not getting a lot of attention. Still, last Monday Sen. John McCain made a campaign appearance in front of a largely Irish-American audience in Scranton, Pa., “often described as the country’s most heavily Irish city,” according to the Boston Globe.

McCain promised to address the issue of immigration if elected. And he said he would put undocumented immigrants “on a path to citizenship,” according to the Irish Voice.

There are 50,000 Irish men and women in this country illegally at this time who are hard working people and who want to become citizens.

It seems many in the audience did not agree with him on the issue, which has been contentious in local campaigns. Irish-American attendees interviewed by the Irish Voice opposed the idea of legalization for undocumented immigrants.

“As a first generation in this country, my mother came over here through all the channels. I don’t see why anybody else should be allowed come into this country and live off of what we have worked for all of our lives,” said one of them.

It may sound surprising, considering the number of undocumented Irish living in the U.S. But as another interviewee said, “I just never thought of Irish as being illegal.” (more…)

It took Ryszard Klimek seven years to register to vote.

Since he became a citizen in 2001, American politics was not a subject of his interest. “Politics in my country is a parody. So I lost interest in it and I didn’t feel like getting involved here either,” says Ryszard, 35, who came to America in 1995 and works as an electrician. When he was 16, the Communist regime that ruled Poland for decades tumbled. Since then the newly-created Polish democracy has turned into a rampant form of pluralism where parties easily come into being, merge or cease to exist, amidst divisions and disagreements.

To Ryszard, American politics seemed very different than what he knew from his home country, and not being proficient in English, it was very difficult for him to understand it. But this year he decided to finally register and vote.

“The candidates are more interesting and the issues are important,” said Ryszard, pointing out the war in Iraq, immigration reform, and the declining economy.

This year’s election ignites excitement across American society, including immigrant voters who hope to see the issues they care about addressed by the candidates.

(more…)

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…)

Vicente Fox at Wayne State University. (Photo: Centro Fox)

A capacity crowd of activists, politicians, students and intellectuals from the Detroit metro area gathered at Wayne State University Sept. 12 to listen to former Mexican President Vicente Fox give a lecture on “Globalization and Immigration.” Those attending the highly publicized event were eager to hear Fox’s thoughts on immigration from the Mexican perspective.

While the immigration debate has mostly been put in the back burner -as opposed to the economy and the Iraq war- during the 2008 campaign, Fox said he believes the issue will be front and center and could be used as a wedge issue as we get closer to the November 4 election.

When asked about his thoughts on the current debate, Fox said the discussion was “misleading, full of destruction and lack of factual information.” He went on to say that the immigration debate needs to be more objective and that the American people, as well as the media, are uninformed.

According to the Employment Policy Foundation, the United States has a systemic labor shortage that is expected to transform the workplace over the next 25 to 30 years, as baby boomers retire. In this context, while the United States needs and benefits from immigrant labor, Fox said, Mexico suffers from the northward migration in the long term, losing its human capital.

“All this energy, all this talent is needed in Mexico for the development of the nation and the competitiveness of the economy,” Fox said.

Immigration regulation is key to changing the current dialogue. Fox said he supports legislation like the failed McCain-Kennedy bill, proposed in 2005. The plan would have allowed illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. before Jan. 7, 2004, and who have jobs, to work legally for an additional six years and eventually become citizens, after paying fines and meeting certain citizenship requirements.

(more…)

This story is by Macollvie Jean-François, a Haitian-American news reporter with the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale.

On a recent Thursday night at a Haitian restaurant near Fort Lauderdale, Karl Heintz held court at a table where he sat with a half dozen other Haitian men. Over a heap of bronzed chicken and mounds of rice and beans, Heintz, a 36-year-old small-business owner, gave a 15-minute synopsis of the presidential race and the candidates that would rival that of any cable news network political analyst. He went from Barack Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention to Sarah Palin’s interview with Charles Gibson.

About a week later at the Palm Beach County Civic Center in Delray Beach, about 80 Haitian-Americans assembled for a Haitians for Obama rally. When a few people pulled out checkbooks to donate, Frantz Richard, 54, persuaded them to do it online instead. He keyed in their credit card and other personal information on the laptop right there at the reception area.

Excitement over Obama’s candidacy and disenchantment with the Bush administration have combined to push Heintz, Richard and other Haitians to actively campaign this year. Heintz said he’s not part of any formal groups, but he stays informed, has made nearly $500 in campaign contributions over several months, and he understands how close the election could be. (The 537 votes that cost Gore Florida in 2000 are becoming something close to a mantra, with many people alluding to them in cautionary tones.)

Haitian-American users on Facebook and MySpace, meanwhile, have been circulating information about the candidates for months. 

Within this mostly-Democratic voting bloc, most of the campaign events in South Florida are pro-Obama. Most Haitian-Americans support the Democrat unabashedly, citing his inspiring success in America as a black man with a “hyphenated identity.” His migration experience and his exposure to world cultures resonate with them as immigrants.

On the other hand, efforts supporting the Democratic ticket seem belated and less visible than during previous elections, for a variety of reasons— the online outreach option being one. Four years ago, you couldn’t drive two blocks in the traditional Haitian enclaves without seeing a storefront window plastered with red-white-blue campaign posters. However, quite a few Haitians for Obama groups have emerged since Hillary Clinton’s concession and the DNC. They’re now hosting fundraising events, handing our car stickers, and sporting t-shirts bearing Obama’s face with his “Yes, We Can” slogan in Creole: “Wi, Nou Kapab.”

(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.

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.”

(more…)

As he campaigned across Florida this week, Sen. John McCain gave a Latino audience in Orlando a version of his stump speech that differed significantly from speeches he gave to other Florida audiences.

Speaking at a town hall meeting at the Asociación Borinqueña de Orlando, a Puerto Rican group, McCain told the audience that he would make immigration reform one of his, “first priorities,” if he is elected president.

But in another Florida appearance yesterday, in Jacksonville, the Republican candidate remained mum about the subject. Beth Reinhard and Mary Ellen Klas of the Miami Herald report,

Once pummeled for backing what critics tarred as ”amnesty,” McCain has talked little about immigration during the general election campaign. He did not raise the issue Monday in Jacksonville, reliably Republican turf where he began a two-day tour that wraps up Tuesday in Tampa.

But Orlando offered a different audience. Central Florida is home to a fast-growing Hispanic community coveted for its political independence, unlike the staunchly Republican Cuban-American voters who have dominated Miami-Dade politics.

Earlier this week we reported on other instances where McCain has offered different messages on immigration policy depending on the composition of his audience.