About 1 million legal immigrants are expected to try to naturalize and register to vote this year in an attempt to defeat presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, according to an array of liberal activists organizing a voter registration drive in battleground states.
“There is something unique and significant happening in the immigrant community, and I think more broadly in the Latino community,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., said on a conference call with reporters Wednesday morning. “There is really a hunger for citizenship, and it’s driven by the desire to participate in this year’s presidential election, and particularly this presidential election.”
U.S. Customs and Immigration Services is working to expedite the naturalization process, in part by providing fee waivers to lower-income immigrants, but the new voters’ influence on the 2016 campaign could be far less than the naturalizations goal suggests. It will take five months for the applications to be processed, meaning that most of the applications this year will be too late for the November campaign.
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