By John Ballard
Frank Sharry is Founder and Executive Director of America's Voice. With
the support of allies in the immigration reform community, he created
the new organization in early 2008 to focus on communications and media
as part of a renewed effort to win comprehensive immigration reform.
Prior to heading America's Voice, Frank served as Executive Director of
the National Immigration Forum for 17 years. The Forum, based in
Washington D.C., is one of the nation's premier immigration policy
organizations, and has been at the center of every major legislative
and policy debate related to immigration for the past quarter of a
century. Sharry is a native
of Connecticut and a graduate of Princeton University.
With the national spotlights aimed at a war in Asia, health care reform, the economy and unemployment, the 2010 census is sneaking up on the country.
...the 2010 Census is going to shake things up politically in this country, and politicians would do themselves a favor to wake up and smell the coffee in advance.
This is about raw political power -- something politicians of all stripes understand.
Here is what a new study by my organization, America�s Voice Education Fund, has to say: the 2010 Census, which will document Latino population growth, will have a profound effect on the U.S. political landscape. An astonishing number of states will owe new Congressional seats, in large part, to their new Latino constituents.
The findings provide a stunning political backdrop to the upcoming debate on comprehensive immigration reform, an issue of major consequence to Latino voters.
Since the 2000 Census, Latinos have become the largest minority group in the United States. A bipartisan firm, Election Data Services, Inc. used existing Census data to project which states are likely to gain and lose Congressional seats following the 2010 Census. Their projections show that eight states will gain at least one House seat, while eleven states will lose at least one seat in Congress. Here they are:
States gaining House seats: Texas (+4), Arizona (+2), Florida (+1), Georgia (+1), Nevada (+1), Oregon (+1), South Carolina (+1), and Utah (+1).States losing House seats: Ohio (-2), Illinois (-1), Iowa (-1), Louisiana (-1), Massachusetts (-1), Michigan (-1), Minnesota (-1), Missouri (-1), New Jersey (-1), New York (-1), and Pennsylvania (-1).
Latinos represent 51% of population growth in the United States as a whole since 2000. Latinos have driven growth in the states poised to gain House seats following the 2010 Census, especially in those projected to gain more than one seat: Texas and Arizona. In those two states, Latinos comprise a combined 59% of population growth since 2000.
As the report indicates, Latinos are not just settling in the usual major cities.
New members of Congress in states like Georgia and South Carolina, as well as Arizona and Texas, will owe their positions, in part, to the expanding Latino population. What�s more, states that are losing Congressional representation would have fared much worse had Latinos not moved there in record numbers. While their states� Congressional delegations are shrinking overall, Latino voters are gaining power as they expand their share of the electorate.
These population figures translate into significant new voting power, too.
Nationwide, Latino voter registration grew 54% and Latino voter turnout grew 64% between 2000 and 2008. In the eight states poised to gain seats, Latino voter registration grew 45% and Latino voter turnout expanded 50% between 2000 and 2008. In the eleven states poised to lose seats, Latino voter registration grew 50% and Latino voter turnout expanded 62% between 2000 and 2008.
Plenty to think about here as Congress slogs away at health care reform.
The GOP will either become more inclusive or it will be displaced by some other party.
The defenestration of Lou Dobbs is just the beginning.
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The political sands are shifting beneath our feet. There is a connection between jobs and immigration but not the one most people imagine.
Numbers are bad in this country but they are far worse abroad.
Of course the amount of money being sent home by immigrants working in America is shrinking.
And there are reports of money being returned.
For five years, immigrant day laborer Leo Chamale wired money twice a month from New Jersey to his family in Guatemala. Recently, he stepped up to the money-transfer window for a different purpose - to ask that his family send some of his savings back to him.
"I hadn't worked for five months, and I was two months behind on rent, so I had them send $1,500," the 21-year-old Mr. Chamale said in Spanish. "My mother said, 'That's a lot of money.' "
With the U.S. economy in a ditch, money-transfer agencies have been reporting a decline in the wages that immigrants are sending back to their home countries. Now, it appears that some immigrants are going a step further - asking their relatives to wire them money.
The flow of remittances between the Dominican Republic and the U.S. has undergone an interesting change recently, an apparent consequence of the economic recession that has affected many immigrant workers in the U.S.
Remittances � funds that immigrants send back to their home countries � are a major source of income in the Dominican Republic. Now, a leading New York-based money transfer firm, La Nacional, has reported a spectacular increase in the amount of money Dominicans are sending to the U.S.
�We have seen a significant increase in the number of money transfers made from the D.R. to the U.S.,� confirmed Reny Pena, supervisor of customer services and transfers at the company�s office in the Upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights.
Pena said that the volume of transfers from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. grew from between 80 and 120 monthly transfers in 2006 to the current rate of about 150 transfers a day. The increase has prompted the agency to expand the department that deals with U.S.-bound remittances from one to five employees.
I think most Americans have no idea how important immigrants are, not only to our economy but to others often receiving a significant part of their earnings. My own limited experience has included more immigrants than most and in most cases I have seen an impressive degree of entrepreneurship and creativity. My favorite is a Cambodian man who started as a dishwasher in the Seventies and became a saught-after sushi chef charging for coaching clinics and operating his own restaurant. And when we were young, one of my roommates was a young Korean who appeared on an Atlanta sidewalk one evening, the victim of a scam that brought him to America with the promise of what turned out to be a non-existent opportunity. Within a year he had got a job repairing business machines, bought a car and soon opened his own store repairing and retailing business machines.
Too often we fail to appreciate that those we may imagine are at the bottom of the ladder are not important because they are doing menial jobs. But the reality is often that they are seriously under-employed for a variety of reasons, including language challenges and foreign educational credentials not recognized in America. In a few cases they come from well-established families with more assets than we may know, but they have come to America in search of different or better opportunities.
A young man from Bangladesh working as a dining room attendant in my cafeteria fell in love with a young Mexican girl and got married. Before a year had passed, they had bought a small lunch business selling wings and hamburgers which she was running while he continued a year or two more earning tips in my dining room which were invested in their new enterprise.
An older man who was like a "Daddy" to my dishroom staff from time to time returned to Mexico to check on things. He was practically illiterate and had to use a translator to communicate with me, but in his home town he was a landlord of two or three business properties sending rent to his family there.
My neighborhood includes a Mexican family that was here before we arrived six years ago. They have a lovely, well-kept house and have always paid dues to the Home Owners Association. With a house full of kids and two or three cars, they are supported by an auto repair business operated by the father and his oldest son, now in high school.
Among my staff before I retired were employees from Haiti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Pakistan. I have watched wave after wave of immigrants coming into the country for my whole working life. The food business is very labor-intensive and it is no accident that when all else fails, someone from another country can always fall back on opening a restaurant selling whatever cuisine they know. Even if they know nothing else, they can always cook the food they grew up eating. (Which is partly why the food business is so competitive.)
I could fill pages with stories like these. But the point is that Americans disregard immigrants (or worse, malign them) at their peril. This story has been true for years, but only recently did the political consequences begin to gel. 2010 and 2012 will be interesting years to watch elections.
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