The Obama administration and its allies are holding scores of events this week as part of a sweeping new initiative to nudge 8.8 million legal residents who are eligible for naturalization to become full-fledged citizens — and therefore, eligible to vote.

The not-so-secret expectation is that most of them would probably register as Democrats, given the demographics heavy on Hispanics and Asians — a fact that has not been lost on many conservatives.


“We’re getting lower-income people who are coming in and taking more services, and they’re drawn to the Democrats,” said Ed Martin, president of the right-wing Eagle Forum, which raised the alarm last year in a report titled “How Mass (Legal) Immigration Dooms a Conservative Republican Party.” “That’s what Obama knows, and that’s what the Democrats know, and that’s what Republicans should know and should be fighting back against it,” Martin said.

It turns out that many Republicans consider legal immigration a more immediate and existential threat to the GOP than illegal immigration. While the total number of illegal immigrants is estimated at 11 million, there are more than 13 million permanent legal residents — and that number could grow at a clip of a million a year.

Most of those green card holders are already on a path to becoming citizens and voters, and their politics skew Democratic.

The White House’s “Stand Stronger” initiative, announced last week, aims to remove barriers for permanent residents to apply for full citizenship, including the right to vote. The White House and its partners are planning 70 outreach events in the first week alone, as well as 200 naturalization ceremonies that will induct 36,000 new citizens over the same period. The administration has also lowered other financial barriers to obtaining citizenship, including accepting credit cards to pay the fee, and it’s considering further reducing costs for those who have low incomes but make too much to have the fee waived completely.

More than 30 percent of the green card holders eligible to apply for citizenship are originally from Mexico, according to federal data. Of the top 10 countries of origin, only two — Canada and the United Kingdom — are not in Latin America or Asia.

Conservatives have increasingly been raising the alarm about legal immigration as a more imminent threat to Republican power than any possible pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the U.S.

Just last month, immigration hard-liner Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) called for reducing the number of green cards issued each year, warning that the government is on track to allow 10 million new permanent residents into the country over the next 10 years. While his analysis focused on what he considered the potential negative economic impacts, the political implications were unsubtly telegraphed in the states cited to put the 10 million figure into perspective: The new residents would be “larger than populations of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina combined.”

The Eagle Forum paper cites Pew polling data showing that Asians and Hispanics tend to support “bigger government providing more services” at significantly higher rates than the general public.

“Republicans can never turn liberal-leaning immigrants and their adult children into supporters of limited government faster than the current high level of legal immigration (one million a year) is bringing in new liberal voters,” the report warns.

The White House insists the initiative was not focused on elections and was simply part of “Citizenship Day” on Sept. 17.

The White House's initiative coincides with a visit to Washington by Pope Francis, a strong champion of immigrants. The Catholic Church has long advocated for immigration reform in the United States, and the pope had even hoped to visit the U.S.-Mexico border during his trip, though he decided not to for logistical reasons. Although the Obama administration didn't explicitly link its plans to Francis, the rollout could take advantage of the general mood in town during the visit of the highly popular, Argentine-born pontiff.





“The idea of raising awareness about the rights, responsibilities and importance of citizenship is not a partisan idea,” said a White House spokesperson.

But it comes as members of the administration — up to President Barack Obama himself — have been stepping up their critique of Republicans’ anti-immigrant rhetoric. Vice President Joe Biden denounced what he called Donald Trump’s “sick message” on immigration, telling a gathering of business leaders last week that government should be “welcoming, rather than disparaging” immigrants as sources of economic dynamism.

Trump, for his part, echoed earlier remarks when he said, “We have a lot of really bad dudes in this country from outside.”

Those remarks will galvanize Hispanics, said Janet Murguía, head of the National Council of La Raza, a strong backer of the administration’s efforts on immigration.

“Latinos are responding against this demonization in the most American of ways: immigrants who are eligible are becoming citizens,” she wrote in a recent blog post, “and those who are citizens are registering to vote.”

According to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, it takes an average of six months to complete the naturalization process.

