Commentary on “Citizens by Choice, Voters by Necessity: Patterns in Political Mobilization by Naturalized Latinos”

The recent growth of the Latino population can be directly attributed to changes in U.S. immigration law in the mid-1960s. As the share of Latinos who were first-generation immigrants expanded from 20 percent in 1970 to 40 percent in 2000, questions concerning Latino immigrants' impact on Latino political empowerment became salient in the emerging subfield of Latino politics. Among the handful of scholars in the subfield concerned with the political behavior of immigrants, there was general agreement that the presence of large numbers of immigrants with limited resources and political experience, along with low rates of naturalization, was a major reason why Latinos' demographic ascendance had not translated into greater political empowerment. One study somberly concluded that Mexican immigrants were not "a political resource readily available to enhance the political fortunes of the Mexican American community" and that "there is little reason to conclude that Mexican immigrants will for the foreseeable future involve themselves either in Mexican American issues or in American politics more generally" (Garcia and de la Garza 1985, 562-63). As the empirical evidence showing low rates of naturalization and political participation among Latino immigrants accumulated, some regarded them to be a political liability. This general sentiment began to crumble after the passage of Proposition 187 in California. Proposition 187 appeared on the 1994 California ballot as a measure designed to stop the flow of illegal immigration to the state by denying public services to undocumented immigrants as well as requiring public officials, including doctors and school teachers, to report suspected immigrants to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Although the initiative passed easily, with 59 percent of the vote, Latino opposition was overwhelming, and the opposition to the initiative showed surprising ability to mobilize foreign-born Latinos to political action. Data on naturalization also clearly showed that Latino immigrants reacted to this initiative and other policy-based attacks by naturalizing in record numbers in the years immediately following this event. Activists asserted that Latinos generally and immigrants in particular were mobilizing, registering, and voting at record rates, a set of claims to which most scholars in the subfield long familiar with the political behavior of Latino immigrants reacted with natural skepticism. Past claims of new and rapid Latino mobilizations had frequently proved to be disappointingly premature. Sensing a general shift in attitudes and behaviors among our immigrant friends and family members, we were not so sure these activists had gotten it wrong. Adrian Pantoja began developing this article in Gary Segura's Minority Politics Seminar. They refined and presented it at the 1999 Western Political Science Association meeting in San Jose. On the panel was Ricardo Ramirez, presenting his own paper on the effects of political context on Latino and white voting behavior. Ricardo's insights and feedback-and his discovery of a critical error in the uncorrected data set-proved to be invaluable, and he was added as a coauthor. "Citizens by Choice, Voters by Necessity" emerged from our discomfort with the prevailing wisdom regarding Latino immigrant political behavior in the discipline and a collective effort that transformed the article into an important new finding. Before this article, the Latino behavior literature largely focused on transplanting extant work on Anglos to the Latino context and introducing the relevant considerations of Latino heterogeneity, particularly on dimensions of national origin group and whether the individual was foreign born or U.S. born. "Citizens by Choice, Voters by Necessity," represented a break with the earlier work because it began with the recognition of a new reality, one missed (or at least misunderstood) by others more established (at that time) in the field. …