Shared Prosperity: The New Voices in Civic Engagement

By Matt Saldaña

On a cold day in January 2009, with the economy in freefall and the United States at war on two fronts in the Middle East, Barack Hussein Obama, a self-described "son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas," was inaugurated the country's 44th president.

"We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness," he said to a crowd of nearly 2 million, huddled together on the National Mall. "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth."

To many, that declaration would have seemed impossible just one year ago. Anti-immigrant rhetoric filled the airwaves for much of 2008 and threatened to upend support for a candidate who had spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. Ultimately, Obama's victory depended not only on the insolvency of such language but also on support by a new class of voters: a coalition of Asian Americans, Latinos, and so-called New Americans born to immigrants in the latter half of the 20th century. According to a study by Pew Hispanic Center, Latinos voted in unprecedented numbers in 2008, favoring Obama by a factor of two to one. Exit polls conducted by CNN show Asian Americans similarly favored Obama and suggest the Latino vote may have handed Obama a victory in several critical swing states, including Indiana and North Carolina.

"We've shown that we have the numbers to really shift the political calculus that goes into election strategy for generations to come. There is no question about the power of the immigrant vote," says Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC).

In New York, where more than 4 million foreign-born workers produce nearly a quarter of the state's economic output, according to a recent study by the Fiscal Policy Institute, Ms. Hong's organization has sought to implement a "community-based electoral machine." So far, NYIC has had resounding success, registering a quarter million new immigrant voters over the past decade. But due to the many hurdles immigrants face, including popular resentment, a citizenship backlog, and what Ms. Hong deems the "immigration divide" of English language learners who graduate from high school at a rate far lower than their native-speaking peers (23 percent to 53 percent, in New York), voting is a linear solution to a multidimensional problem.

"Because they're so marginalized, I think immigrant communities are developing a new model of civic engagement that goes beyond just voting," Ms. Hong says.

Luz Santana, co-founder of the Right Question Project, says such comprehensive civic participation is critical. Her Cambridge, Massachusetts-based organization teaches low-income and disenfranchised adults-including immigrants-the skills of question formulation and self-advocacy and recently applied its hands-on curricula to a 10-state pilot program called Voter Engagement Strategy for Election Day and Beyond.

"The [prevailing] idea is that civic participation means going to the voting booth every two years in the local elections, and then every four years," Ms. Santana says. "No. We need to help people see that decisions that affect them are being made all the time."

Santana says those decisions range from a doctor's diagnosis or a teacher's classroom strategy to fundamental policy shifts in education, health care, and immigration. She says it will be "critical," over the next four years, for policy conversations to be open and inclusive-and for immigrants to participate.

That might not sit well with those who favor an enforcement—only strategy for securing the country's borders. But a broken immigration system—in which an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants remain in the shadow economy-affects all of us, says Ms. Hong.

"Immigrants are part of the economic engine, and we should capitalize on that instead of trying to exclude them from job training programs or education programs," she says.

A recent editorial in The New York Times, about the appointment of U.S. labor secretary Hilda Solis—a prolabor descendant of Latino immigrants—echoes Ms. Hong's argument for shared prosperity: "If you uphold workers' rights, even for those here illegally, you uphold them for all working Americans."

Ms. Santana says she is counting on the administration to address immigration policy "in a right and humane way" but that implementing real change will require a new perspective on the part of all Americans. "There needs to be this change in the way people see immigrants, the way they see that they bring value," she says. "If I continue being fearful of the people who are coming, nothing is going to help me support them."

Ms. Santana and Ms. Hong know the benefit of firsthand knowledge. Ms. Santana arrived in Massachusetts as a 24-year-old single mother from Puerto Rico and made her way through unemployment and welfare to earn a master's degree from Springfield College School of Human Services. She credits her success to the kindness of others who believed in her, and says she now strives to give back some of the things people gave me.

"I see that it is very important to invest in people, in helping them learn, so they can help themselves," she says.

Meanwhile, Ms. Hong arrived with her parents from South Korea at the age of 11 and saw the "polar opposite sides of America." In St. Louis, her family felt "strange and different" but was welcomed by the local community. Later, as her family struggled through poverty in the Boston area, Ms. Hong was made to feel like a "huge liability on the school system," an experience she says is common among immigrant children today.

Like Ms. Santana, Ms. Hong learned English from Catholic nuns, and the opportunity eventually propelled her to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania and lead the NYIC.

Ms. Hong says we must harness the "generous volunteerism side of America" in order to develop meaningful solutions to the problem of immigration. While anti-immigrant strains remain—and the educational and immigration systems in America beg for reform—Ms. Hong and Ms. Santana say change is possible.

"I don't think anti-immigrant scapegoating will die out very easily, but I think we have a stronger vision," Ms. Hong says. "It's a vision of shared prosperity and social harmony that capitalizes on diversity and talent and on the vibrancy that immigrants bring to this country—coming together with others who were here previously."

This is one of three features from the Democracy in Action cover story in the  2008 Annual Review.