Speaking today on PRI’s The World Aswini Anburajan talks about the reasons so many first-time immigrant voters showed up at the polls today in New York City.
Press play to listen to her conversation with The World host Lisa Mullins or click here to visit the show’s page.
[audio:http://64.71.145.108/audio/1104086.mp3]
Today's stories in the NY Daily News on Latino voters
Writing in today’s New York Daily News, Feet in Two Worlds blog editor Diego Graglia writes,
Despite ambitious voter registration drives by Hispanic advocacy groups this year, it still remains to be seen whether the election will be the breakthrough they expect.
Despite predictions of record turnout by Hispanic voters on November 4, Diego spoke with a Latino pollster in Florida who said Latino voters may not be as excited about the presidential candidates as some people assume they are.
Click here and here to read Diego’s stories and here for a photo slideshow.
Journalist Diego Graglia recently traveled from New York City to Mexico City, stopping along the way to talk to Latinos in small towns and big cities about the issues that matter to them. For more on La Ruta del Voto Latino/The Road to the Latino Vote visit www.newyorktomexico.com.
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.