immigration

More than 200 people from 57 countries were sworn in as U.S. citizens in a Lower Manhattan courtroom on Oct. 10 – just in time to make the state voter registration deadline.

Salomon Riges turned in his application for U.S. citizenship about a year ago. Under guidelines set by Congress and the Bush administration, he should have been naturalized within six months, giving him plenty of time to register and vote.

Riges didn’t vote on Tuesday. He wasn’t registered. And he had not been naturalized.

Wait Til Next Year

“Maybe next year the papers come in, and next election, I vote,” he said, shrugging.

Voting rights activists say it wasn’t Riges’ fault that his citizenship didn’t come through in time. They say more than 1 million would-be citizens were blocked from voting either because of paperwork delays or because of increased fees for the citizenship application.

More than 1.4 million people, including 100,000 in New York, applied for citizenship between September 2006 and September 2007.

“Last summer the government raised the fee for processing and made no allowance for increased applications,” said Ron Hayduk, co-director of the Immigrant Voting Rights Project. “It’s been a disaster.”

In July 2007, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services upped the citizenship application fee from $400 to $675. Anyone who applied later than May 2007 was not naturalized in time to vote, Hayduk said.

Lawsuit Over Backlog

Hayduk added that citizenship applications always increase in election years, but the Bush administration did not make staff changes to handle the expected increase this year until it was sued over the backlog.

That lawsuit, Milanes v. Chertoff, was filed in March 2008, after the turnaround time for applications had ballooned from six months – the standard waiting time from application to taking the oath of citizenship – to 18 months.

Jose Perez, associate general counsel for Latino Justice, the immigration rights group that brought the suit, said that although the case had been dismissed, it had caused USCIS to hire extra staff and allow more staff overtime in order to get applications processed more quickly.

“We have appealed the decision because we believe the judge erred in a number of respects and failed to certify a group of applicants in the subclass so they could be naturalized in time to vote in November,” Perez said. “This is another battle we need to engage in, but it appears we may be winning the war.”

More than 200 people from 57 countries were sworn in as U.S. citizens in a Lower Manhattan courtroom on Oct. 10 – just in time to make the state voter registration deadline.

Under bands of wood held tensely in place by the ceiling of the Steinway & Sons piano factory, 19 thin sheets of tulipwood are pressed into one uniform piece. Behind the worktable, newspaper clippings from the sports page of an Italian newspaper scream soccer highlights.

Up the stairs and past workers from Bangladesh, India and Croatia, another workstation showcases articles about the New York Giants. In the employee locker room on the same floor, a makeshift shrine to the Yankees hangs at eye-level.

On each of the four floors composing the 40,000 sq ft. building, banners display the company motto: “We Are Family.”

But despite the eclectic taste in sports and mélange of ethnicities, none of the 450 employees that work at Steinway in Astoria need to be reminded that they are family; the average tenure of a worker is 15 years and many have been there for more than 30.

The company has provided steady employment for more than 150 years, relying heavily on the waves of immigration that continuously wash into New York’s harbors.

“First it was Germans, Italians, Yugoslavs and Russians. Now it’s India and Haiti,” said Dominic Iovino. “But it’s always been a family.”

“A Passion”

Iovino should know. During his 40 years as a tuner with the company, he has worked with two of his uncles and a cousin. And for many of those years, he tuned pianos side by side with Wally Boots. Boots, who grew up two blocks from the factory, has worked at Steinway for 46 years. So have three of his brothers.

“At first it was just a job,” Boots said. “Now it is a passion.”

The passion Boots speaks of is obvious — the factory is full of burly blue-collar men delicately crafting intricate parts and running their ruddy fingers over faux-ivory keys. It is the thread that connects workers, who hail from more than two dozen countries.

Talent Search

Though historically the factory provided a bellwether for immigration patterns in the Astoria, a recent influx of young professionals priced out of Manhattan has changed the neighborhood’s demographics. Steinway now relies on word-of-mouth — passed from cousins and uncles in America to relatives in villages all over the world — to find workers with the technical skills required to make one of Steinway’s iconic pianos.

“What we get are talented workers coming to us, either in woodcraft or in music,” said Leo Spellman, senior director of communications for Steinway.

In the small world where Boots and Iovino have sat together for decades, pictures cover the walls from ceiling to floor. It is impossible to tell where the photographs of family stop and those of colleagues begin. Leaning over the shiny lacquered top of a Steinway Grand, Boots proudly shows off the fringed American flag vest he wears while riding his motorcycle. Next to the vest is a calendar he recently made, each month featuring a fellow worker’s bike.

Looking on, Spellman smiled.

“The faces will change; the accents may change,” he said,”but the characters don’t.”

(Click here to read an interview with Henry Steinway)