It’s been an arduous, 24-year wait for Jose Merino to get to this point.
That’s how long Merino, a Sonora native, has been living in Tucson and working toward his citizenship. Now, finally, his time has come. But it’s coming a few days too late.
Merino, who came to Tucson to work for the Arizona Daily Star on a work visa all those years ago, now serves as deputy director of Pima County communications. He passed his citizenship interview in September, he told me, and his naturalization ceremony is scheduled for Oct. 11.
Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller
That’s four days after the Oct. 7 deadline to register to vote in this election.
“For me personally, it’s been a 24-year journey that ends Oct. 11,” Merino said. “That is the beginning of my life as an American. It (voting) would have been the cherry on top.”
“I’ve been waiting to vote forever,” he said.
The fact that he won’t be able to register should tell you something. Once again, the claim that Democrats are getting non-citizens to vote, or jamming citizenships through to win votes, is circulating. Still, the evidence is absent.
Elon Musk, the increasingly deranged billionaire, floated a related, bogus theory on Sept. 29. In a long post on X, the social media platform he owns, he said:
“Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!
“Let me explain: if even 1 in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something that the Democrats are expediting as fast as humanly possible, that would be about 2 million new legal voters in 4 years.”
Musk, by the way, is himself an immigrant from apartheid South Africa who acknowledges living in a “gray area” of immigration law after arriving in the United States. His brother Kimbal said more flatly that they were both “illegal immigrants” for a time.
Elon Musk’s online claim went on, but there’s no need to quote his baseless rhetoric any more. Even the right-leaning Washington Examiner debunked the claim. They pointed out that a person who crosses the border between ports of entry and claims asylum today would not even potentially be able to win citizenship and cast a vote until 2035.
And that’s only if they win their asylum cases, which most don’t, and move on to obtain citizenship as quickly as possible.
Much more common are experience like that of Merino, his wife and their one child who was born in Mexico. For them, people who this country should have quickly and eagerly embraced, it took decades. And even now, one, Jose Merino will be left out of the political process this year, since his wife and son became citizens earlier this year, in time to register.
Too-late naturalizations
Hearing about Merino’s case caused me to look up the schedule of naturalization ceremonies. There are five separate ceremonies happening in the Tucson area in October, all of them after the voter-registration deadline passes. Three more are scheduled in November, and four in December.
In Phoenix, there are five naturalization ceremonies scheduled in late September and early October, before Arizona’s registration deadline. Another six are scheduled in October after the voter-registration deadline, with a regular rhythm of ceremonies continuing into November and December.
This is not the behavior of a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency busily trying to cram through naturalizations to influence the election. It looks a lot like business as usual.
Nevertheless, the claims that non-citizens will pervert this year’s election have been raging, inspired by Donald Trump’s conspiracy-mongering. The allegations could be laying the groundwork to claim this year’s election was stolen, if Trump loses again.
In Arizona, the fears of noncitizens voting have been elevated some legitimately bad record-keeping in the state level.
A legal group founded by Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s attack dog on immigration, filed suit Sept. 3 in Phoenix federal court, demanding that the state’s 15 county recorders perform new checks to ensure that a subgroup of 41,000 federal-only voters are eligible.
It was unconscionably late for them to ask for this, and the counties are contesting the group’s request for a temporary restraining order.
His group also has dived into the tussle over the estimated 218,000 existing Arizona voters whose citizenship status had not been checked as previously thought. This is a real issue that the state’s bureaucracy screwed up by discovering it so late.
The reason it happened is complicated, but it resulted from the state requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration in 2004, but needing to deal with all those who had already registered. Some Motor Vehicle Division records that state officials thought showed citizenship proof actually didn’t.
Now, Miller’s group has filed an additional suit for the names of all those people in that approximately 218,000-person group. The plurality of them, by the way, are Republicans. Miller claims to be fighting “mass illegal alien voting,” but it’s likely that practically all of those in this group are citizens.
Prove a negative
I will be shocked if there are more than 50 non-citizens shown to be registered in that group of 218,000, Or in the group of 41,000 federal-only voters.
Time and again, “mass illegal alien voting” has been shown not to be a real thing. It’s a specter raised at this time every general election for political purposes. Every year, groups demand that officials prove a negative: That non-citizens aren’t voting.
They never fulfill their own obligation to bring evidence that non-citizens are voting.
Maybe a new vetting of the 218,000 voters will be a good measuring stick. It won’t happen till after the election this year, but it will be meaningful to know whether any of them are actually non-citizens.
I’m betting few if any are. Almost certainly, they’re citizens who did everything right whose status officials simply didn’t check correctly.
If so, it will back up the evidence we’re seeing from U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services. They don’t even appear to know when the voter-registration deadlines are, let alone be cramming citizenships through before them.
