By Robert Knight
The White House has doubled down on its efforts to use massive
immigration for political advantage.
On September 17, traditionally known as Constitution Day, the White House chose to highlight it as Citizenship Day, announcing a national campaign by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to naturalize legal immigrants and turn them into millions of new voters by 2016.
That’s right. Tax dollars allotted to the agency responsible for safeguarding our borders and ensuring national security are being spent to facilitate a permanent political sea change next year.
Reporting on the campaign, The New York Times noted that “about 60 percent of immigrants eligible to naturalize are Latino and about 20 percent are Asian, both groups that voted overwhelmingly for President Obama. Nearly a third of legal permanent residents eligible to naturalize are Mexican.”
Since 1980, the Hispanic vote differential for Democratic presidential candidates has never been less than 18 percent (Democrat John Kerry v. President George W. Bush in 2004) and has averaged 33 percent. With Hispanics making up more than 10 percent of the electorate and growing fast, this is no small advantage.
Asian voters, who once were typically anti-communist, Southeast Asian refugees who voted overwhelmingly Republican, now heavily favor Democrats. In 2012, nearly three-quarters of Asian-American voters, who represent 3 percent of the electorate, voted for President Obama.
These demographic trends bode well for Democrats, but for a White House looking to establish permanent, one-party rule, it is never enough. Hence, Homeland Security’s campaign to naturalize 8.8 million green card holders as fast as possible.
Last November, President Obama created the White House Task Force on New Americans “as part of a series of executive actions to fix our broken immigration system.”
J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department Voting Section attorney and a Policy Board member of the , wrote on April 23rd in PJMedia.com that, “DHS sources report that racial interest groups such as La Raza (translated to “The Race”) and the American Immigration Lawyers Association have been playing a central and influential role in rewriting the administration’s immigration policies – both the public policies as well as internal and largely unseen guidelines.”
The National Council of La Raza’s former Senior Vice President for the Office of Research, Advocacy and Legislation, Cecilia Munoz, an assistant to the president and director of the Domestic Policy Council, co-chairs the Task Force on New Americans.
“Her particular area of expertise is immigration policy, which she covered at NCLR [La Raza] for twenty years,” says her White House web page. Her co-chair is Leon Rodriguez, who Mr. Adams said was “a central player in the radicalization of Eric Holder’s Civil Rights Division.”
With the country divided almost equally between the two major parties, a massive voter infusion of newly coined citizens could easily tip the balance, which is why Democrats relentlessly press for immigration amnesty while their media allies label any resistance to unlimited immigration as “hate,” “bigotry” and “xenophobia.”
DHS is funneling millions of tax dollars to groups that back amnesty and naturalization. The agency’s Citizenship and Integration Grant Program has awarded $53 million through 262 competitive grants since 2009 to organizations in 35 states and the District of Columbia, according to its website.
Major grant recipients include Catholic Charities in several cities as well as various ethnic pressure groups in major urban areas all over the country. One perennial $250,000 grantee, Make the Road New York, recently sponsored the Fourth Annual TransLatina March to protest “Homotransphobia.”
Over the past week, DHS’s United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) offered practice tests on cellphones for citizenship tests, 70 workshops and 200 naturalization ceremonies.
America is a land of immigrants. Even Native Americans probably emigrated from Asia. And America has benefited from millions of legal immigrants who play by the rules and seek better lives.
Mr. Obama is importing and bribing a new electorate with government largesse in order to fundamentally transform the United States. Immigration per se is not the issue.
The combination of lawless immigration with ruthless political calculation, is.
* Robert Knight is a senior fellow for the and a Washington Times contributor.
