The Obama administration is launching a campaign to accelerate the conversion of millions of immigrants to citizenship. The nation’s immigration agencies will spend big bucks on “outreach” activities and the Naturalization process will be streamlined. The goal is to add several million new citizens to the voter rolls by November 2016.
If you think the Naturalization process is governed by law and long–established rules so we need not worry about shortcuts and wholesale fraud–wake up. This is the Obama Administration we are talking about. If you think immigration law enforcement was politicized, wait until you see what citizenship fraud looks like. It will become very politically incorrect to question any immigrant’s right to vote.
The fact that newly naturalized citizens routinely vote Democrat more than Republican by 3-to-1 is, no doubt, a pure coincidence and has nothing to do with the desire to “expedite” the creation of new citizens.
By law, a legal immigrant can apply for citizenship and begin the Naturalization process after five years.
- There are over 8.8 million immigrants now eligible.
- Another 5 million will become eligible in the next four years.
- Approximately 1.5 million each year will become eligible over the next decade.
- Between now and 2024, almost 20 million immigrants could become citizens and join the voter rolls.
The citizenship application form, the N-400 Form, is available online, and an army of lawyers is waiting to help the 13 million eligible immigrants. There will be taxpayer-financed mobile units roaming the rural parts of America to be sure no one is overlooked. Uncle Sam wants YOU!
Historically, only about 60 percent of legal immigrants eventually became citizens, and different nationalities have sought citizenship at different rates. Millions of legal immigrants have been content to work and live in the United States without seeking citizenship. Now, there will be a bilingual multimedia campaign to remind them it is their duty to become voters, and jumping through the hoops will be made incredibly easy.
The Yearbook of Immigration Statistics provides a wealth of historical data about immigration and Naturalizations. For example, it tells us that legal immigrants from Mexico have always had one of the lowest rates of Naturalization. Could that be the reason the Obama appointees at the USCIS came up with an expensive PR campaign to educate, encourage and facilitate more Naturalizations?
- Is it pure coincidence that more than 30 percent of those 8.8 million immigrants now eligible for citizenship are Mexican-born, or that more than 70 percent of Mexican legal immigrants register as Democrats if they become citizens?
- Would the USCIS bureaucrats have discovered this urgent need for an “outreach campaign” if 80 percent of those 8.8 million were from Europe instead of Latin America and Asia?
No one will argue with the right of legal permanent residents to become citizens by following the lawful process for Naturalization. We all have parents, grandparents or great-grandparents who did that, and we are glad they did. What raises red flags and rocket flares is not those aspirations but the motives, methods and malevolence of a lawless White House. Will Obama’s lawyers at USCIS bring the same passion and creative circumventions of law to the Naturalization rules and procedures as they have to other parts of immigration law?
In fact, we all know there will be fraud disguised as “expedited enfranchisement” on a massive scale so that the maximum number of new voters can be added to the rolls. And like other immigration benefits, once awarded, the new legal status dare not be taken away.
But the story does not end in 2016 or 2024. A September Pew Research Center report predicts 59 million new immigrants between now and 2065 if present trends continue–and that projection does NOT count 10-20 million illegal aliens given legal status and eventual citizenship through another amnesty.
But wait; there’s more fun and games in store. If Obama succeeds in his plans, his model for “facilitating” expedited citizenship will inevitably become the “new normal.” By 2065, those 59 million new immigrants will produce about 50 million new citizens of foreign birth–and 35 million new Democrats.
Optimists will paint a more rosy scenario. However, optimists will have to contend with the lasting effects of the Obama administration’s official abandonment–in the June “New Americans” manifesto–of assimilation as an integral, necessary element of immigration. You see, it is now officially considered xenophobic and racist to expect immigrants to adopt American values and adapt to American institutions. After all, every progressive knows that constitutionalism and the rule of law are mere artifacts of history, not anchors against the periodic storms of tyranny.
It is not an exaggeration to say that under Obama, the Naturalization process–becoming a citizen–no longer requires becoming an American. The real tragedy and the real crime of the Obama plan for accelerated Naturalization of millions flows from the redefinition of citizenship as a triumph of multiculturalism.
Obama’s most radical goal has not been the transformation of our economy, our foreign policy, or our place in the world. Obama aims to transform what it means to be an American.
Given the lack of resistance and absence of Republican leadership in opposition to those ideas, by the time those 50 million former immigrants cast a vote in 2065, it won’t matter which party wins the election.
Tom Tancredo is the founder of the Rocky Mountain Foundation and founder and co-chairman of Team America PAC.
Tom represented Colorado’s sixth congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 1999 to 2009, and he is a former presidential candidate.
He is the author of In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border and Security.
