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Transnational Politics and Civic Engagement: Do Home-Country Political Ties Limit Latino Immigrant Pursuit of U.S. Civic Engagement and Citizenship?
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Transnational Politics and Civic Engagement Do Home-Country Political Ties Limit Latino Immigrant Pursuit of U.S. Civic Engagement and Citizenship? Louis DeSipio Over the past decade, the number of immigrants naturalizing in the United States has surged. According to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, naturalizations grew from an average of 146,000 annually in the 1970s, to 221,000 annually in the 1980s, to 562,000 annually in the 1990s. In the years since 1996—the beginning of the contemporary surge—the number of immigrants naturalizing annually averages 650,000. The origins of this steady increase in naturalization are several. While there are particular shocks and enhanced incentives that appear periodically (Portes and Stepik 1993, DeSipio 1996a), the underlying cause of the contemporary growth in naturalization is the combination of high interest among immigrants in pursuing U.S. citizenship and steady growth in the long-term immigrant population (Pachon and DeSipio 1994, NALEO Educational Fund 2004). These long-term immigrants have been shown consistently to be more likely to naturalize than are more recent immigrants, particularly among Latinos, who make the largest pool of immigrants to permanent residence.1 The increase in immigration beginning with the 1965 amendments to the immigration law ensures that there now are large numbers of immigrants with the twelve to fifteen years of legal residence that often precedes naturalization among Latinos (U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service 2003: Tables M and 54, and INS Statistical Yearbooks , previous years). The rapid increase in the number of immigrants naturalizing should not obscure the fact that there is also an increase in the number of immigrants eligible to naturalize who have not. Data on the emigration and deaths of the legal permanent residents is not maintained, so it is not possible to provide an exact number of citizenship-eligible immi- Transnational Politics and Civic Engagement 107 grants. A recent estimate of 2000 census data conducted by the Urban Institute’s Jeffrey Passel for the NALEO Educational Fund estimated that there were 7.7 million legal permanent residents in the United States eighteen years of age or above with sufficient residence (generally , five years) to be eligible to naturalize. Of these, 4.2 million were Latinos (NALEO Educational Fund 2004). Legal permanent residents under eighteen years of age can naturalize only as part of their parents’ naturalization. This large pool of immigrants, including a significant share of longerterm immigrants, raises a recurring question for the polity. Will these immigrants join the polity and participate as equals with the U.S. born? The United States has faced this question before, but the cyclical nature of large-scale immigration makes it particularly pressing now. The roots of much contemporary immigration can be traced to the 1965 changes to immigration law. The dramatic effects of that law on the numbers of immigrants were not felt until the 1980s. So, we are now in the era of a mature immigration, where there are large numbers of recently naturalized citizens, many long-term permanent resident immigrants, and an even larger pool of short-term immigrants, many of whom are undocumented. This variety offers an analytical opportunity, exploited here, but also a pressing policy challenge. In this essay, I want to revisit two existing scholarly literatures on the civic engagement of immigrants and on what differentiates immigrants who naturalize from those who do not. I want to see if the findings of this existing scholarship remain when a newly emerging characteristic in the contemporary immigrant experience is added to the story. Specifically, I want to analyze the impact of transnational political engagements and comparative evaluations of political opportunities in the United States and the country of origin on civic, residential, and political attachment to the United States. This essay has three parts. First, I briefly review the existing scholarship on immigrant civic engagement and immigrant naturalization propensity and indicate why “transnational” politics might alter traditional patterns of U.S. immigrant political adaptation. Second, I discuss a new data source—the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute (TRPI) 2002 Immigrant Political Participation Survey2 —that allows me to test the impact of several sets of immigrant characteristics that have been shown to shape immigrant civic engagement and naturalization propensity (demographic, attitudinal and familial, and immigration and settlement), but that also includes a rich battery of questions relating to home-country political engagement and attitudes toward the [44.200.74.73] Project MUSE (2024-03...