ith the White House hanging in the balance, pollsters and pundits alike are focusing on the battle between Vice President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush for crucial voting groups, like suburban married women, Catholics, and the elderly.
But there is another battle that Gore has already won, perhaps decisively, and without public notice: With a push from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, more than 1.7 million resident aliens have become US citizens in the past two years, most of them with an incentive to vote and a lopsided preference for the Democratic Party.
Gore's advantage in this area is nowhere more evident, and potentially more significant, than in California, with its 54 electoral votes. Since 1994, with Democrats controlling the White House, California has welcomed 1.6 million new citizens, a third of the national total.
''Both parties show up at swearing-in ceremonies to try to register voters,'' said William A. Carrick, a California Democratic consultant. ''There is a Democratic table and a Republican table. Ours has a lot of business. Theirs is like the Maytag repairman.''
But the phenomenal increase in naturalized citizens - 5.6 million nationally from 1991 to 2000 - is also occurring in large numbers in other battleground states, including Washington, Illinois, Michigan, and Florida.
As the deadline for voter registration neared in Chicago earlier this month, the Chicago INS office was holding two swearing-in ceremonies a day to accommodate the crush of newly minted citizens. In Illinois, an estimated 85,000 new citizens have taken the oath in the last two years, most of them in heavily Democratic Chicago.
In smaller but closely contested Washington state, the number of new naturalized citizens shot up from 3,289 in 1991 to more than 16,000 in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. As in California, Mexican-Americans dominate among new citizens.
But California, as is often true, is in a class by itself. The nation's largest state, once reliably Republican in presidential elections, has been politically transformed by the new wave of citizens.
Since 1994, in response to a Republican-sponsored anti-immigrant ballot question, voter registration by Latinos - by far the largest group of new citizens - has more than doubled in the state, providing Gore with much, and perhaps all, of the cushion he now holds over Bush in California.
There is no evidence that the surge this year and last is prompted by anything other than a large backlog of applicants: Legal aliens seeking citizenship status in record numbers, often out of fear they will be cut off from government services. Citizenship for many has become decidedly more valuable than a green card.
But politics was a clear factor in 1996, a record-breaker for the swearing-in of new citizens. With such a rich harvest for the Democrats, the White House, with Gore's office taking the lead, pressured the INS to naturalize 1 million new voters by Election Day, according to White House documents assembled by congressional investigators.
Memos to Gore and to President Clinton by eager staff members cited the need to naturalize a million new voters for the 1996 election, with one urging Gore to pressure the INS to ''waive any INS rules, provided they stay within the law.'' Gore's e-mail response: ''We'll explore it. Thanks.''
Another memo, to Clinton, declared, ''You asked us to expedite the naturalization of nearly a million legal aliens who have applied to become citizens.'' The memo suggested options that included ''Lower[ing] the standards for citizenship,'' but also expressed this concern: ''INS warns that if we are too aggressive at removing the roadblocks to success, we might be publicly criticized for running a pro-Democrat voter mill.''
Thanks to such pressure, the INS swore in 1,044,689 new citizens in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 1996. But relaxing the rules exacted a cost.
In the process, INS neglected to do fingerprint checks on about 180,000 of the applicants that year. A later check discovered that at least 80,000 had criminal records, and 6,300 of those had commited serious crimes.
This time around, House Republican officials say they have no evidence of impropriety. Nonetheless, there is another dramatic surge in the number of new citizens. After exceeding the 1 million goal in 1996, the numbers dropped off, to 598,225 new citizens in 1997 and 463,060 in 1998, according to INS data. But in 1999, the number nearly doubled, to 872,427. In the fiscal year that ended this past Sept. 30, the number rose even further, to 898,315.
The 1996 controversy aside, immigration law specialists say the rapidly rising numbers of newly naturalized citizens in the last decade - four times the number naturalized during the 1970s - are justifiable and explainable without the politics.
More than a decade ago, the United States granted amnesty, and legal alien status to an estimated 2.8 million people who had been in the country illegally. After a five-year wait, they were entitled to apply for citizenship. But many did not.
What prompted the stampede for applications was a series of moves that noncitizens saw as threatening, most prominently California's Proposition 187, a successful 1994 ballot initiative that barred illegal immigrants from getting many public benefits and services. A federal court ultimately found it unconstitutional.
''Then came a second wave of immigrants seeking citizenship after the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 made legal immigrants ineligible for some benefits unless they became citizens,'' said Michael Fix, the director of Immigration Studies at the Urban Institute.
With government rationing benefits based on citizenship, and the INS summarily deporting legal immigrants arrested even for minor crimes, the surge of applicants resumed after 1996.
''Both welfare reform and Proposition 187, both highly identified as Republican initiatives, made new citizens much more likely to become Democrats,'' Fix said. ''Such initiatives have not just given immigrants the incentive to naturalize, but the incentive to vote as well.''
The effect has been most pronounced in California, which until Proposition 187 had long been seen as a safe haven for immigrants. California, with 12 percent of the US population, accounts for a much larger percentage of immigrants.
If the Clinton White House pushed the envelope to maximize naturalization in 1996, California Democrats said the reverse was true when the GOP held the White House. ''The Republicans deliberately bogged down the INS processing of applications because the new citizens helped the Democrats,'' said consultant Carrick.
The GOP-inspired proposition's ripple effect is still being felt. By Carrick's estimate, Latino voters in California have become increasingly Democratic. Whereas Latinos once chose Democratic registration by a 3-2 ratio, it is now 70-30 overall. And registration among the newest voters is even more lopsided.
In 1996, for example, Clinton beat Bob Dole among Latino voters 70 to 21 percent. But among first-time Latino voters, Clinton's margin was 91 to 6 percent, according to exit polling data.
The nonpartisan Field Institute, the granddaddy of California polling firms, reported in May that 16 percent of the electorate is now Latino. In the last 10 years, 1 million new Latino voters have registered. In the same period, Field found, white non-Latino registration declined by 100,000.
David Abraham, an immigration law specialist at the University of Miami Law School, said that new citizens, nationwide, seem to be disproportionately Democratic, ''based upon their class, their background and their economic status.'' The most notable exception, Abraham noted, are Cuban-Americans, whose allegiance to the GOP remains unwavering.
But even Florida is changing. The percentage of new Florida citizens from Cuba is declining, as immigrants from Mexico, the Caribbean, and other Latin American countries flock to the state.
In California, where Gore's lead over Bush is in the single digits in the most recent polling, the Texas governor has made major purchases of television advertising aimed at Latino voters. Bush speaks Spanish in the ads.
