voting

Magaly Garcia swung her hips as she stepped left, left, right, right, then back to the middle at a Mexican dance club in Jackson Heights, Queens. Two bucks there buys a song, a lesson in the traditional dance Cumbia, and an earful of politics.

“Obama’s more for the people,” said Garcia, 22, in Spanish. “And he cares about the poor more than McCain.” Her dancing job at the Roosevelt Avenue club fetches enough cash to survive and to send home.

This election season, thousands of immigrants in New York have come home to a daily stream of presidential election coverage on television. From exotic dancers to taxi drivers, immigrants’ lives are affected by the shifting economy, and thus have a stake in the outcome of the election. But noncitizens can do little more to influence it than talk to friends, family and dance partners, and many don’t expect much from the government.

Jobs Are Key

“They can help the economy get more jobs,” said Garcia, who moved to the U.S. three years ago from Mexico City without government approval or her newborn son, Armando. “But I don’t think they’ll be able to help people without papers.”

On Election Day, 45-year-old Olga Flores wore a black bomber jacket and scanned a long line of people stretching down a Williamsburg, Brooklyn sidewalk. But she was not looking at a polling line. Rather, she was staring at her competition. She and other women from Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Poland waited for local residents who need their houses cleaned to hire them. Not many came.

Flores moved to New York 20 years ago from Mexico City and has no legal standing. She vented in Spanish.
“What kind of opinion can we have? We have no voice or vote,” she said. “If there was a way to vote, I would vote for change.”

Not every noncitizen shared Flores’ vision. Taxi driver Asif Raqiq, a 36-year-old from Pakistan, would vote for McCain if he could. He felt Republicans could better handle it “If something were to happen, say with Pakistan,” and added that McCain “would be very cool minded.”

As Raqiq waited for a fare at LaGuardia Airport, his body tensed at the mention of the Democratic candidate.
“Obama’s very young, inexperienced,” he said. “You can tell by the way he talks.”

A mile away, near the 82nd Street stop on the No. 7 line, a Brazilian exotic dancer named Patricia chatted on a smoke break. She declined to reveal her last name. A rhinestone bra peeked out from under her faux-fur collared jacket.

Patricia came to the United States three months after she lost her job as a factory manager in Brazil. She pointed to her white leather purse, which she said was made at the factory she ran in Minas Gerais, a central Brazilian state, and said she hoped a change in government would help her return to the industry.
“Obama will bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.,” she said.

Call For Representation

Bryan Pu-Folkes, a Jackson Heights attorney and founder of New Immigrant Community Empowerment, an advocacy organization, feels immigrants should be politically represented.
“Why shouldn’t they have a say in the laws?” he said. His group supported a City Council bill that would allow legal non-citizens to vote in New York City municipal elections. The bill stalled in 2006, but Pu-Folkes plans to carry on the effort. He added that even illegal immigrants contribute to the economy by paying sales tax.

Juan Carlos, a 30-year-old dishwasher from Guatemala, passed out menus on the sidewalk for a Jackson Heights Indian restaurant. He explained why he felt Obama’s immigration policy would make him the better president.

“He’ll make it so everyone’s free to work,” Carlos said in Spanish, adding play on words that suggested the candidate was intelligent and worked for the people: “Intellegente y por la gente.”

Sandra C. Roa contributed to this article.

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.”

At the crack of dawn on Election Day, 44-year-old Aaron Cook headed to the polls in Bedford-Stuyvesant to vote for the first time.

“I didn’t think it was necessary,” Cook said. “I said ‘Why waste my time?’ But this time, I felt a little different. I felt maybe something could happen.”

With record numbers expected to vote in the presidential election, many Brooklynites showed up as the sun rose. Dozens joined Cook and as he lined up at the Cornerstone Sandy F. Ray Senior Housing Center.

“Getting up early this morning standing on line wasn’t a problem for me,” said Shara Martinez, 30, an Obama supporter and second-time voter. “I think it was a beautiful experience because I’m glad that we’re gonna get a president that can help [the country] and bring it back up to par where it once was before Bush came into office.”

Kanke Ikpi, 26, said that she was not bothered by the early morning. In fact, she said she had trouble sleeping Monday night because it felt like the day before Christmas.

“I’m really excited,” Ikpi said. “Hopefully, at the end of the day it goes the way I want it to go.”

Many voters shared her excitement as they exited the double doors of the senior center this morning.

“It’s been a very exciting, historical election for me,” said 18-year-old Terrell Johnson, a first- time voter who arrived at the center before it opened to voters at 6 a.m. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a while.”

Age: 63
Neighborhood: Kingston, NY
Occupation: Retired schoolteacher, Global History
First Time Voter: No
Political Affiliation: “Left-wing Democrat”

“The current Administration has destroyed the honor of this country.”

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