In 1997 there were 26 million foreign-born residents in the United States, almost tripling the number of 30 years earlier. Most of these immigrants arrived after the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, which loosened restrictions that had been in place for 40 years. Many of these recent immigrants have arrived from Latin America (13.1 million) and Asia (6.8 million), areas that had not provided the bulk of immigration previously. Latin American immigrants now make up more than half (51.3 percent) of all foreign-born residents in the United States, with immigrants from Asia making up another 26.8 percent (Schmidley and Gibson, 1999, p. 11). From 1980 to 1998, 5.8 million foreign-born residents chose to naturalize as US citizens. On the one hand, this provides evidence that as this most recent wave of immigrants has settled in the United States, they have begun to make their way as political actors, naturalizing as American citizens, participating in the electoral process, and following other, non-electoral, paths for political mobilization. The growing numbers of naturalized citizens make up an increasingly important bloc of voters, for which both major parties have begun to vie. On the other hand, with increases in the overall numbers of immigrants, naturalized citizens now make up only about one in three immigrants. The proportion of citizens to non-citizens is the lowest it has been in the last century. Clearly the formal incorporation of immigrants as citizens is incomplete. What makes some immigrants naturalize and others not? Once naturalized, why do some vote, and others stay away from the polls? Though there is still much to learn, there is a growing literature on immigrant naturalization and voting, with a series of studies tracing who naturalizes and who votes. The gist of these studies is that Latin American immigrants are less likely to naturalize than Asian or European immigrants, and that new immigrants on the whole are less likely to vote than native born citizens (Ramakrishnan and Espenshade, 2000; Bass and Casper, 1999; Tam Cho, 1999; Mollenkopf et al., 1999; Lien, 1998; Jones-Correa, 1998b; Johnson et al., 1999; Minnite et al., 1999; DeSipio, 1996; Levitt and Olson, 1996; Portes and Curtis, 1987). These studies have focused largely on the individual characteristics of immigrants to explain variance in rates of political participation among immigrants, and between immigrants and the broader population. In short, they fi nd that the reason that immigrants have lower participation rates is largely due to individuals’ lack of critical resources, whether in the form of education, income,