Port Chester’s June 15 village trustee election is bringing an assortment of firsts. One of them is the unprecedented diversity of candidates for Port Chester village board. I wrote today about the three Latino candidates among the 14 people running for trustee — one each on the party slates and one independent. All six seats are up for election under cumulative voting.

Befitting Port Chester — where the Latino community draws from multiple nationalities and no one group seems to predominate — the three Hispanic candidates are originally from three different countries: Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. The Andean nations are quite well represented this time around, though Mexicans, Central Americans and Caribbeans also figure prominently into the population.

Data analyst Tim Henderson sent me this set of Census estimates from 2008 for Port Chester’s Latino population, broken down by region of origin.

Total Port Chester population: 27,773

Hispanic/Latino: 13,633

Mexican: 3,206, or 24 percent of Hispanics

Puerto Rican: 830, or 6 percent

Cuban: 514, or 4 percent

Dominican: 451, or 3 percent

Central American: 2,761, or 20 percent

South American: 5,618, or 41 percent

Other Hispanic/Latino: 253, or 2 percent

For more on the election click here, and check out portchestervotes.com.

CNN is following up on Hispanic Heritage Month with a “Latino in America” series Oct. 21-22, and some advocacy groups are responding with a pointed message: You can’t have it both ways — You can’t expect us to tune in and still allow Lou Dobbs to spread falsehoods about Latino immigrants on prime time.

America’s Voice and Media Matters plan to run an ad on CNN next week  as part of the Drop Dobbs campaign. It runs through the show’s coverage of conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth, an imaginary North American Union, and a supposed plan for Mexicans to reclaim the American southwest as Aztlan. Media Matters has compiled a fact-check about the show, and its claims about illegal immigrants, here.

The Basta Dobbs campaign is circulating this video by Arturo Perez, which mentions the common claim, echoed locally by New York Assemblyman Greg Ball, that about a third of prisoners are illegal aliens. We fact-checked that claim on the state level here and at the national level here. (The actual percentage is 6 percent if you include all noncitizens, whether legally or illegally present in the United States.)

A vigil has been planned for weeks in Rockland as a way to bring attention to the immigration issue, but it’s taken on new urgency after the news of a hate crime in Long Island.

The slaying of Ecuadorean immigrant Marcello Lucero is “exactly, exactly goes to why we feel it is so important for us as a community to look at what is happening in the struggle around immigration in this country, the fear and hatred that is beginning to drive the dialog,” Gail Golden of the Rockland Immigration Coalition told reporter Suzan Clarke. The coalition is co-sponsoring the event along with a group of Episcopal ministers who are meeting in the area.

The vigil is from 5 to 7 p.m. tomorrow at Middletown Road and Route 59 in Nanuet. Another begins at 7 in Patchogue, Long Island.

Newsday is reporting in detail on the stabbing death of Marcello Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant who authorities are calling the victim of a hate crime.

Seven teen-agers are charged with first-degree gang assault, and one is also charged with first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime.

But some immigrant advocates are placing further blame on Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy and the heated debates in the legislature over illegal immigration.

Here is a comment from Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition:

We extend our deepest condolences to the Lucero family, and call on all New Yorkers to come together in the face of this terrible tragedy to affirm their commitment to diversity and inclusion, and commit to fighting racial violence. Such hateful acts have no place in our community and our nation.

This killing was not a random isolated incident without any context. It arises out of a climate of hostility towards immigrants that has festered in Suffolk County for many years, spurred on by irresponsible political rhetoric and divisive legislation.

This is not the first time that the scapegoating of immigrants has created an environment conducive to violence against immigrant communities, but it needs to be the last.

While we are grateful that the authorities have taken swift action, it is important for all Americans to understand that this is part of an alarming trend taking place nationwide.

For too long hate groups and hate speech have dominated the national debate on immigrants, mischaracterizing all Latinos and the institutions that serve them in the process. Lives are literally in the balance.

We’ve got some new data on how many people registered to vote this year in Westchester County, and Hispanic enrollment appears to be surging.

Hispanics are about 8 percent of the voter rolls in Westchester, but they account for 14 percent of registrations this year, says Tim Henderson of our Journal News data desk. (He’s making estimates based on Hispanic surnames — not an official tally, but a common means of estimating the number.)

Latinos account for about 18 percent the the overall Westchester population, so their share of the voter rolls still lags, relative to others.

In Port Chester, about 24 percent of registered voters are Hispanic. But Hispanics appear to account for 40 percent of new registrations, more than 300 out of 755.

Similar trend in Carmel, Putnam County: Latinos account for 7 percent of enrolled voters, but 13 percent of the newly enrolled.

And the Hispanics are trending Democratic. The big picture: More than 8,000 Hispanics have registered to vote this year in the Lower Hudson Valley, and that will bolster the Democrats’ edge in Tuesday’s election. Hispanics registered Democratic at a 4 to 1 rate in Westchester and Rockland counties, and 2-1 in Putnam. The estimates are based on an analysis of Hispanic names on the voter rolls in October.

So, what can we expect from the “immigrant vote” in Election ‘08? Or the ever-intriguing Hispanic vote? This is no swing state, but there does seem to be an unprecedented interest in the presidential race, even in the smallest corners of Westchester. Perhaps this grocery store window in New Rochelle is an indication.

The store is Tostadas Quitupan, owned by former New Rochelle council member Roberto Lopez. He and his wife are keeping registration forms on hand and delivering them to the county Board of Elections. Alida Yoguez also keeps a stack of forms at her store across the street, Union Ave. Liquors. I spoke to them last week for a story about how recent immigrants are being affected by the economic downturn. Yoguez said she regularly asks her customers whether their children have turned 18, and if so, gives the customer a form and follows up afterward. (Public service announcement: the New York registration deadline for the Nov. 4 election is Friday.)

It’s hard to tell in advance whether turnout will be higher than in previous elections, but a whole lot of people seem to think so. Remember the slogan from those immigration marches around the country? “Today we march, tomorrow we vote.”

I attended a “Feet in Two Worlds” discussion at the New School in NYC about the immigrant vote in ‘08. Here are some highlights:

• Given the climate on immigration this year, voting is “an act of self defense” for Hispanics, said Arturo Vargas of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials. He said naturalized citizens tend to outperform native-born citizens in voter turnout.


• Glenn Magpantay of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund said voter registration was the key, particularly for immigrants who didn’t have a history of voting in their country of origin. “Once our community actually does register to vote, they turn out in high numbers,” he said.


• Research has shown that Hispanics have shifted farther away from the Republican Party. Among Asian-Americans, 59 percent are Democrats, 12 percent are Republicans and 27 percent are unaffiliated, Magpantay said.


• The immigration issue has received little attention in the presidential race compared to the economy, Iraq, Afghanistan, health care, etc. Then again, it depends on the audience, said Pilar Marrero of La Opinion newspaper. Both John McCain and Barack Obama are focusing on immigration in their Spanish-language ads. Marrero said she’s making a point of informing her readers that the messages are sometimes quite different in English vs. Spanish. At the GOP convention, for example, the Spanish-language media was told not to look at the platform, but at McCain’s statements. “It’s kind of a schizophrenic approach to the issue,” she said.

A new report from the Pew Hispanic Center charts the impact of the economic downturn on immigrants — specifically non-citizens, who are traditionally more vulnerable to changes in the job market.

The median U.S. household income inched up just 1.3 percent between 2006 and 2007, but for non-citizen households, incomes fell 7.3 percent.

“Less-skilled workers in blue-collar occupations can benefit tremendously from tight labor markets but are also the most susceptible to economic downturns,” the report says.

Other findings:

• The worst income drops seen among non-citizens in 2006-07 were among Hispanics, construction workers and those with less education and fewer years in the United States.


• The main cause of the drop seems to be the decline in construction. The industry lost more than 700,000 jobs in 2007.


• Nearly half of non-citizen immigrant households are headed by an undocumented immigrant.

Oct. 6, 2008

Leah Rae

The Journal News

Marisol Guadian works on the proverbial Main Street, and says she’s seen Wall Street’s troubles trickling down for months now.
Her clients are mostly immigrants who come into the TelePort-Chester agency in Port Chester for money transfers and plane tickets. Customers still wire money home to family members in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, but only in half the amounts they once did. And most travelers have a new request.
“The people come in and say, ‘I’m looking for only one way,” she said. “This year is terrible.”
Whether immigrants are returning to their countries of origin in any large numbers remains a topic of speculation. But studies are beginning to document a slowdown of illegal immigration into the United States and a drop in the amount of money being sent back to countries in Latin America.

The attorneys in the Port Chester voting rights case are done talking, and now a federal judge will decide how to reform Port Chester’s village board election system. His job is to choose a system that will allow Hispanic voters to participate fully and that will fix the problems he found in his January ruling.

Judge Stephen Robinson has found that Latinos are at a big disadvantage in a system where the trustees run in village-wide races for two open seats each year. The court found that if trustees ran in separate districts, one of which had a Hispanic majority, then Latinos would have a means to gain representation in their local government.

The case is complicated and easily misunderstood. Basically, the Department of Justice proved a set of problems with the old system. The voting pattern in Port Chester has been racially polarized, and candidates supported by the entire Hispanic electorate routinely lost. There was also the matter of a racist flier in 2007 and a lack of language assistance at the voting booths. No Latino, incidentally, has won office in a village that is nearly half Hispanic.

One of the details mentioned in the final day of arguments yesterday was a bit ironic. (I didn’t have room for it in today’s Journal News article, attached below.) Cesar Ruiz, at right, the unsuccessful board candidate who sparked the case and became a plaintiff, doesn’t live within the proposed Hispanic-majority district. His attorney, Randolph McLaughlin, proposed that candidates in each new district not be subject to a residency rule.

There was also an intriguing discussion about how non-U.S. citizens figure into all this. I’ll get to that later.

(Top photo: Carucha L. Meuse/ The Journal News)

Nearly 10 percent of the Hispanic adults in a survey by the Pew Hispanic Center say they have been stopped by police or other authorities who asked them about their immigration status. The Pew Hispanic Center released results yesterday of its recent survey of 2,015 Hispanic adults. About eight percent of respondents who are U.S. citizens and 10 percent of Hispanic immigrant respondents said they have been stopped and asked about their immigration status by police or other authorities. Other survey responses indicated that half of respondents said that the situation of Hispanics in the United States is worse now than it was a year ago and 57 percent worry that they or a family member or friend will be deported. Click here to see the full report.

St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, a Yonkers parish with a large Hispanic immigrant congregation, will hold its autumn benefit concert on Sunday, Sept. 21 at 3 p.m. The church’s five Spanish-language choirs will perform and tickets are $5. The concert will be held in the basement and food and beverages will be served. Call 914-963-0822.