When Donald Trump descended from his golden elevator to announce his candidacy last June, he staked out a fervently anti-immigration platform complete with wildly offensive generalizations of Mexicans as “rapists” and “drug dealers.” Despite it being a most blatant play for the disaffected white vote by stoking fears of an impending brown takeover, the real-estate mogul has always insisted he could actually win the Hispanic vote. Instead, it appears that Trump is actually inspiring more Latinos to seek U.S. citizenship in order to vote against him, according to a new report from the New York Times:
Over all, naturalization applications increased by 11 percent in the 2015 fiscal year over the year before, and jumped 14 percent during the six months ending in January, according to federal figures. The pace is picking up by the week, advocates say, and they estimate applications could approach one million in 2016, about 200,000 more than the average in recent years.
“I want to vote so Donald Trump won’t win,” 32-year-old Hortensia Villegas, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in the U.S. for 10 years, told the Times. Villegas, her parents, her in-laws and her sister all recently rushed to file their applications for citizenship in order to register to vote in Colorado after observing Trump’s campaign. Villegas’ husband, Miguel Garfío, was born in the U.S. and despite being in the U.S. since the 1980s, his parents never sought their citizenship until Trump’s rise.
