Reinventing Tammany Hall

n the late 1800s, when New York City's Tammany Hall political machine was in its heyday, ward-heeling political operatives made a specialty of harvesting votes from the city's teeming masses of newly arrived immigrants.

"Tammany had a Naturalization Committee-to serve its own ends, of course-but nonetheless an agency that facilitated the naturalization of thousands of immigrants," wrote historian John M. Allswang in Bosses, Machines and Urban Voters (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

The rules in those days were few and the process was rough and tumble. "One naturalization office was in a saloon on Centre Street; it printed over 40,000 certificates that were to be presented to the clerk of any court," Allswang noted. "The tickets were numbered and read 'Please naturalize the bearer.'"

Tammany began as an anti-Catholic organization that excluded foreigners from membership, but it changed its tune as the demographics of New York City shifted. By 1870, 44 percent of the city's population was foreign-born, mostly Irish and German, and in order to survive "Tammany Hall had abandoned its original nativism and actively nurtured immigrant voters," wrote author Philip Perlmutter, in Divided We Fall (Iowa State University Press, 1992.)

Tammany boss Richard Croker, who ran the machine from 1886 to 1901, made no apologies about the change in policy. He once explained to a newsman: "Think of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners dumped into our city. . . . They are alone, ignorant strangers, a prey to all manner of anarchical and wild notions. . . . And Tammany looks after them for the sake of their votes, grafts them upon the Republic, makes citizens of them in short. . . . If we go down into the gutter it is because there are men in the gutter, and you have to go down where they are if you are to do anything with them."

Fast forward 100 years. In July 1994, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley issued an executive order creating a 21-member Citizenship Assistance Council, to spur naturalization and voter registration among a growing immigrant population.

Named by Daley to chair the new "naturalization committee" was a community activist named Daniel S. Solis, who is now an alderman. In September 1994, when President Clinton visited the Windy City for a Senate fund-raiser, he happened to sit next to Solis. "I basically told him the same thing that I had been telling the mayor and the Republican governor of Illinois," says Solis. "That there are 3.1 million people that are going to be naturalizing in the next few years."

In an October 1994 letter to Clinton, Solis urged that "The Chicago Model"-a cooperative naturalization venture involving business, church and community organization leaders-be replicated around the country. His importunings to the White House coincided with early planning efforts by the Immigration and Naturalization Service that resulted in a major five-city naturalization drive Citizenship USA launched the following year.

Allswang, a native Chicagoan who now teaches at California State University (Los Angeles), says similarities between today's efforts to recruit immigrant voters and the cynical tactics of the Tammany era are superficial at best. "In the 1860s, '70s and '80s, they were just circumventing the law entirely," he says. "It was a matter of getting them off the boat and marching them up to a federal judge to get their citizenship before you do anything else."

What's more, Allswang says, the old-style urban political machines that used to provide tangible benefits, such as jobs, food or buckets of coal, simply don't exist anymore. The impetus for naturalization no longer comes so much from vote-seeking politicians, he argued, as it comes from immigrants seeking the vote. "Today, it is the group itself and its leaders who play the most important role in terms of political orientation," Allswang says.

Another major difference is that the immigrants being naturalized today are scarcely "fresh off the boat." To become citizens, most immigrants have to have lived in the United States as legal permanent residents for at least five years. Spouses of U.S. citizens can naturalize after three years.

But a great many of those stepping forward to seek citizenship today have been living here and participating in the economy far longer, says Harry P. Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute in Claremont, Calif., and former director of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO).

During his long tenure with NALEO, Pachon closely studied naturalization trends and was a leading advocate of reforms in the INS' citizenship procedures. He points out that upwards of 2.6 million immigrants, who qualified for legal residency under terms of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act are just now becoming eligible for citizenship.

"If nothing else had happened," argues Pachon, "if there had been no Citizenship USA, you still would have had close to 3 million folks, 92 percent of whom are Latino, applying for citizenship at approximately this period." Most of them, he says, have lived here for at least 14 years.