With his brash rhetoric and hypernationalist platform, Donald Trump at times seems like a gift to activists looking for a boogeyman to rally the immigrant community.
But it's not clear if Trump is actually serving that role, according to naturalization data.
The number of legal permanent residents who filled out applications to become U.S. citizens jumped to 187,635 in the first quarter of the 2016 fiscal year, which ran from October to December. That figure marks a 14.5 percent spike compared to the same three-month period the year before.
The Stand Up to Hate campaign, a collection of nonpartisan and progressive groups that have banded together to help naturalize eligible immigrants as U.S. citizens so they can vote in this election, highlighted those numbers during a call with reporters Wednesday.
Several people involved with the campaign cited anecdotal evidence to argue that the charged political environment has prompted more immigrants to apply for citizenship. This would seem intuitive, considering the presumptive Republican nominee has bashed Mexicans as “rapists” and called for a blanket ban on Muslims entering the U.S.
Stand Up to Hate has helped more than 12,000 immigrants apply for naturalization since last year, and has set an ambitious target of getting 1 million immigrants to apply for citizenship. Reaching that goal would require an annual rate of growth topping 28 percent.
Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.), who has been in Congress for the last five presidential elections, said on the call that his office has noticed an unusual number of constituents asking for help filling out their naturalization forms.
"There’s something new going on,” Gutiérrez said. “And I think we all know that it has something to do with the tenor, the tone of the race that people are confronting.”
Immigrant rights activist Astrid Silva of Nevada agreed, saying that a series of Stand Up to Hate workshops saw lines out the door. Some people who have lived here more than four decades only took the initiative to apply for citizenship this year because of the menacing tone of television news, she said.
“They want to participate,” Silva said. “They feel their communities are under attack.”
Her comments dovetail with a multitude of news stories in recent months highlighting immigrants who have naturalized specifically to vote against Trump.
But actual naturalization data shows a less pronounced bump.
An uptick in eligible green card holders submitting naturalization applications is common during presidential election years. The number of applications jumped 15.9 percent in 2012, according to U.S. Citizenship and Naturalization Services.
That’s more or less in line with the number Stand Up to Hate highlighted on Wednesday, although a month-by-month breakdown of the figures shows that 2016 might outpace the last presidential election year. When compared to the same three-month period from 2012, this year’s first-quarter results were about 6 percent higher.
But the figures will have to jump a lot more to show that Trump alone spurred a surge in applications for citizenship.
The number of applications rose 24.6 percent in 2010 -- well beyond the clip of the first-quarter results highlighted Wednesday. USCIS only keeps monthly data on its website to the tail end of 2011.
The figure shot up 89 percent in 2007, when the fee to apply for citizenship rose from $330 to $595. Many legal permanent residents naturalized ahead the price increase that July, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Hispanic media and activists led campaigns at the time urging eligible immigrants to apply for citizenship.
“I think we have to wait a little bit more for data to see whether or not there is a Trump effect,” Mark Hugo Lopez, who researches Latino demographic trends at the Pew Research Center, told The Huffington Post. “You’ll find many people who have chosen to naturalize because of Donald Trump. But is it happening on a large scale? That’s what we don’t know. I think we have to wait a little bit longer.”
USCIS spokesman Jim McKinney also said more data was needed to assess whether the rise in citizenship applications has been more pronounced this year than in the past.
“Application numbers ebb and flow from year to year and even within the year,” McKinney told HuffPost. “We typically see the highest numbers March through May.”
USCIS takes roughly five to six months to process citizenship applications, so the opportunity for new applicants to get approved in time to vote is disappearing.
Regardless, activists remain convinced that they can take advantage of a political moment in which Trump has largely alienated immigrants.
The first-quarter bump “doesn’t even come close to the trends that we predict we’ll see," said Tara Raghuveer, the deputy director of the National Partnership for New Americans and one of the Stand Up to Hate campaign’s organizers.
“None of us have a crystal ball,” Raghuveer told HuffPost. “Our theory is that the political climate is creating urgency among folks that are eligible to naturalize now."
Editor's note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims -- 1.6 billion members of an entire religion -- from entering the U.S.
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