TO highlight their importance in the United States, Filipino-Americans are urged to be more involved in the political process in their local communities, an immigration lawyer had said.
Legal expert Rolando Rex Velasquez urged members of the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA) to help fellow Filipinos be involved in political issues, particularly the voting process.
“It’s time to get organized. It’s time to let the politicians know that we too have a vote,” he said during the leadership and motivation summit of the NaFFAA Region XI last November 19.
“We have a voice and we can be organized,” Velasquez added at the recent NaFFAA event which was held at Gold Coast Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.
NaFFAA is a non-partisan, non-profit national affiliation of more than five hundred Filipino institutions and umbrella organizations in the US. Its core mission is to empower Filipinos in the nation.
Velasquez, a long-time immigration lawyer who has worked for the US Immigration and Naturalization Services, is vice chairman of NaFFAA Region XI which covers the states of Arizona, Nevada and Utah.
At the Las Vegas event, Velasquez said, “We need to focus on what we can do and let the politicians know what we want and what we can do in terms of immigration.”
In his long legal practice, he had observed that Filipinos are generally prompt in completing their US citizenship applications. But once they become citizens, only few exercise their newly acquired right to vote in elections, he noted.
Velasquez compared the Filipino-American community to the Hispanic community. “One of big things (the Hispanic community) have been doing is pushing to have their community members be citizens and vote right away,” he noted.
“Within the next two election cycles, the minority vote will be the majority vote. It is something politicians understand. It is something the Hispanic community knows very, very well,” he added.
“We can be just effective as the Hispanic community,” Velasquez told NaFFAA members as he urged them to be more involved in the political process.
The Filipino population in the US grew by 38% from 2000-2010, topping off at 2.6 million, records from the US Census Bureau showed.
The number of Filipinos in Nevada increased a hefty 142% in the said ten-year period, making it the fastest growing population in the nation.
“ Nevada ’s Filipinos comprise 3.6 % (of the total state population). It is enough to swing a close election,” NaFFAA said in an earlier statement.
This significant population growth was highlighted by a recent directive to the Clark County Registrar of Voters to include a Tagalog option in electoral ballots for the 2012 presidential election.
The US Census Bureau had informed the district’s Registrar of Voters to have a Filipino language option given the area’s large Filipino population, Clark County Election Registrar Harvard Lomax had said at the NaFFFAA conference last November 19. Lomax was at the event to appeal to the Filipino community for assistance in the implementation of the new directive.
Meanwhile, the significant increase should be used to assert the group’s political presence in the US, NaFFAA also said, noting the significant growth of Filipino communities in other states as well.
In Arizona, Filipino residents grew 116%, while Utah saw its Filipino population growing at 80% from 2000-2010, Census records also showed.
(www.asianjournal.com)
(Las Vegas Dec 1-7, 2011 Sec A pg.1)
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