Naturalized Latino Voters

Tyche Hendricks writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Claudia Galarza, a 25-year-old school secretary in Pittsburg, became a U.S. citizen in January and is eager to cast the first vote of her life for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary in February.

“I really want to make a difference,” said Galarza, who came here from Mexico at the age of 6. “My main concern is the war, because I believe it’s messing up the economy. The second one would be immigration, to help some of the people who’ve been here a long time that don’t have any documents.”

Galarza is among hundreds of thousands of new U.S. citizens who are the focus of a high-profile voter registration drive being rolled out Wednesday by several national Latino advocacy groups who sense a historic opportunity to dramatically increase Latino voting strength for the 2008 presidential election.

The campaign will build on a surge in new citizenship applications over the past year, driven in part by the huge immigrant rights marches in the spring of 2006 and in part by a steep jump in the citizenship application fee this summer. Click here for the full story.

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