Creating informed Kentucky voters, one new citizen at a time | Opinion
All of a sudden, there’s a lot of talk about immigration, from mass deportations to border closures to asylum.
But as usual, many of the people most affected by federal and state policies aren’t really part of the conversation. They may be scared because of a new, more threatening tone, they may be unaware, or they may be too busy trying to make here in the U.S. that politics and policy are an abstraction.
Politics and policy are definitely not an abstraction to Democratic Rep. Nima Kulkarni, a Louisville immigration attorney, and that’s why she’s helped found a nonpartisan nonprofit called the New Americans Initiative. It’s aimed at helping more people become U.S. citizens, and helping them become more involved in the issues that affect them.
“I wanted to make sure we had some way of keeping immigrants in Kentucky informed, engaged and involved,” Kulkarni said. We want to help every immigrant in Kentucky get naturalized, make sure they’re registered to vote and make sure they’re civically engaged.”
Kulkarni estimates there are about 179,000 immigrants in Kentucky, of which 75,000 are registered voters. She said there are many people who are eligible for a pathway to citizenship, or people who could become green card holders, but they aren’t choosing it.
“It might be financial or they don’t know the process, or any combination of those factors,” she said. “If you enter our country as a refugee, you will become eligible to apply for citizenship after five years. We want to capture that and create a pipeline for New Americans.”
One of the group’s two full-time staff is Emily Jones, a longtime immigration attorney with Kentucky Refugee Ministries. Jones said she’s been reaching out to community partners in Lexington and Louisville to let them know there is some new help in their overburdened work. For example, they recently helped the University of Kentucky law school hold a citizenship clinic.
Jones said that with President-elect Donald Trump’s threats of mass deportations, it’s important to make sure everyone who might be affected has current, accurate information, even thought it seems to change daily.
“We think we need to show up in community spaces to keep everybody on the same page — dispel the myths, clarify the process or figure out how it’s impacting real people,” Jones said.
In the last Trump administration, Kulkarni said she tried to mobilize non-immigration attorneys with a kind of boot camp training for exigencies like meeting a client at a local ICE facility.
“That’s under our mission of educating and training,” Kulkarni said.
The presidential change has created a two-pronged approach for New Americans Initiative.
“I think right now my focus has been convening folks to the table and getting community partners and those interested together because we don’t know what’s coming and how it will be implemented,” Jones said.
“Our tactics have to be nimble educating the public with facts and reality will be really important to keep everybody on the same page because if you’re not in the world of immigration, things get said and misinterpreted.”
But they will stick to the longer-term plan, as well.
“What we want is greater overall participation fro our foreign-born citizens,” Kulkarni said. “We’re not telling them how to register or how to vote, but this is an unengaged population. It should be more aware of issues and elected officials and making sure you vote every cycle.”
If you’d like to get involved with training or information sessions, go to https://newamericansinitiative.org/contact/.
