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July 19-25, 1996

Voter Drives On in N.Y.

Community groups register new citizens, organize to increase voter turnout

By Tomio Geron

As hundreds of newly sworn-in American citizens streamed out of the courtroom, embracing family members, eyeing their certificates, or just scrambling for the elevators, three people quickly approached them.

"Excuse me, would you like to register to vote?" Joanne Wong, one of the volunteers from the Asian American Legal Defense Fund (AALDEF), asks the crowd.

Some were enthusiastic and signed the forms. Others declined and moved on, as did the the volunteers who hope to register a few more new citizens before they disappeared into the elevators. Speaking in Chinese and English, they focused on the Asians-now officially Americans-leaving the courtroom, but registered many others anxious to exercise their new right.

Although it was a slow day for the AALDEF volunteers at the federal courthouse in New York City's Chinatown-they registered less than 10 people-they remained optimistic about the summer. Stan Mark, an AALDEF staff attorney, conservatively estimated that AALDEF will register "hundreds and hundreds" this summer. The results of their efforts are difficult to access event by event, but months, or years, from now, their efforts may well become apparent. AALDEF has been active in voter registration drives in New York City's Chinatown for most of its 20 years, but this summer it began an aggressive new program to register naturalized citizens just after they say their oath and sign their papers.

While AALDEF has been told by the INS that they must wait outside the courtroom to register the new citizens, they are currently negotiating to be able to speak inside the courtroom and pass out registration forms. AALDEF hopes this will increase their numbers, improving on their current catch-the-stampede approach.

AALDEF plans to continue its other efforts at registering voters, such as tabling with groups like Chinatown Voter Education Alliance and the Coalition for Korean American Voters in Chinatown, and other areas of New York City.

In this election year, AALDEF is just one of a number of APA and immigrant rights groups which have mobilized to register Asian Americans.

The New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), a nonpartisan umbrella group representing more than 30 organizations, coordinates a large voter registration program that does not focus strictly on APAs.

The NYIC, which last week began working with AALDEF on voter registration, registers about 4,000 new citizens a month by attending swearing-in ceremonies, which are held in places such as the Jacob Javits Convention Center, where as many as 1,500 people at a time take their oath.

Under an agreement with the INS, NYIC volunteers give a quick speech to the citizens-to-be while they wait to be sworn in, explaining the process of registering, as well as the benefits. "The benefit [of voting] is you're able to participate in the political process. We encourage them having a voice," said Arseman Yohannes, NYIC project coordinator for voter registration.

Yohannes noted that the number of people being sworn in has increased sharply in the last few months. While she wouldn't speculate on the causes for this increase, recent anti-immigrant bills pending in Congress, as well as California's Proposition 187, may be a reason. Proposals which would cut off the rights of legal and/or undocumented immigrants to everything from AFDC to, in the most extreme proposal, education of the children of immigrants, may have caused immigrants to speed their efforts at citizenship.

While groups such as AALDEF and NYIC are nonpartisan, one partisan group is hurriedly registering voters, as the deadline for registration for the presidential election approaches in early October.

Local 23-25, an AFL-CIO union representing about 20,000 garment workers in New York City, has begun its annual voter registration campaign, which presumably will tilt new voters toward the Democrats in light of the national AFL-CIO's recent outspoken Democratic support.

"We have endorsed Clinton," said May Chen, educational director for Local 23-25. "The AFL-CIO is determined to win back Congress."

All summer long, a student intern and union staff members will go to garment factories in New York City to register Local 23-25's members, most of whom are Chinese immigrants.

Chen, who is also a delegate to the Democratic National Convention next month in Chicago, hopes the newly registered voters will make an impact in this year's presidential election, especially because of current immigration bills pending in Congress.

"There's definitely a lot of interest [in voting] because of the anti-immigrant legislation now," Chen said. "There's a lot of concern for cuts in Medicare, also cuts in education."

Chen pointed to the recent re-election of Po Ling Ng and a few other community school board members as evidence of Chinese American interest in education.

Chen hopes that the program will counteract the typically low voter registration among Asian American-particularly Chinese American-voters in New York.

"There's a high naturalization rate in the Chinese community, but not the same high voter registration rate," she said.

"In the past, in a good year, we have registered a thousand voters," Chen said, while adding she doesn't expect as high a number this year.

Another group, the Chinese American Voters Association of Queens (CAVAQ), has organized voter registration in the Flushing and Elmhurst areas of Queens, where there is a high concentration of Asian Pacific Americans.

On a busy section of Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing, CAVAQ volunteers approach an ethnically diverse group of APAs.

"We try to register all Asians, not only Chinese, but also Koreans, and Indians," said Linna Yu, the newly elected president of CAVAQ.

"If you don't vote, you don't have power," Yu said. "One year, one politician said to me, ÔYou don't vote, we don't care.' The politicians really don't care about anything else."

As part of the voter registration this year, Yu also is planning educational events such as panel discussions and speaker presentations. She explained, "If you don't understand how important or how American politics is played, you don't vote. They think, Ômy vote doesn't count.' But you have to think, Ômy vote is as important as any other vote.'"

While the presidential election and immigration bills highlight the importance of registering voters this summer, for some politicos in New York City, it's not too early to look toward Campaign '97, in which APAs could make a bigger impact. Two positions up for election, New York City mayor and city councilperson of District 1-the district which includes New York City's Chinatown-promise important challenges for APAs in a city where they represent, by some unofficial counts, more than 10 percent of the population, yet have far fewer registered voters.

In 1991, Kathryn Freed, a Caucasian woman with a political base in the SoHo and TriBeCa sections of District 1, beat the better financed campaign by Margaret Chin for city council. It was a particularly ugly battle in which Chin was red-baited for her supposedly "Maoist" past. Despite a few Chinese Americans who were re-elected this spring to community school board positions and last fall's election of Doris Ling-Cohan to district court, New York City has never had an APA representative on the city council. And this year, Steve Chen, an assistant district attorney in Queens, is running for state assembly from the immigrant-rich Flushing district.

New York City's Chinatown, the largest in the country, has about only 10,000 registered voters, by some estimates less than 10 percent of the actual population. Many have attributed this dearth to the number of undocumented immigrants, a general lack of interest in American politics, or simply a lack of information-all of which make electing a Chinese American representative to the city council difficult. But, privately, local APA leaders and activists are talking about the possibilities for another APA campaign in District 1 next year. They know, however, that in order to win, they'll have to bank on the efforts of groups like AALDEF, NYIC, and CAVAQ.