Asian American voters in California support many pro-immigrant policies and provided strong

Asian American voters in California support many pro-immigrant policies and provided strong support for Democratic candidates in the November 2010 election, according to a poll released Thursday by the University of Southern California (USC) College and Los Angeles Times.

A discussion on “A Changing California Electorate: Immigrant Voters and the Election” was presented Thursday by the USC Unruh Institute of Politics, the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center.

The event focused on the lessons of the midterm election, specifically about the shifting alignments of minority voters in California.

As the United States continues to struggle with its broken immigration system, and California is one of the U.S. states with most immigrants, the poll shows that Asian American voters tend to favor pro-immigrant policies such as reductions in family reunion backlogs, with 82 percent in favor, and legalizing undocumented children with 76 percent in favor, which means the support of the DREAM Act, which will provide legal status for children who entered the U.S. illegally but will graduate from colleges in the U.S.

The poll also found that California registered voters see no easy solution for the state’s huge budget problems. They want the new governor to focus on cutting spending — with little support for tax increases — but their highest priority is protecting spending for health care and education.

They do not want to cut services that they think are important to the state. Indeed, they want to increase spending on K-12 (from kindergarten to high school), college and universities and health care.

“Asian Americans are a community of immigrants,” said Stewart Kwoh, president and executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center.

“We support policies like the DREAM Act and family reunification because we want to give everyone in our community a chance to achieve the American dream,” he stressed.

According to the poll, Asian Americans as well as Latinos voted convincingly for Jerry Brown in the governor’s race and Barbara Boxer in the U.S. Senate race, while white voters were divided.

In the governor’s race, Asian Americans favored Democrat Jerry Brown with 60 percent over Republican Meg Whitman with 39 percent, compared to white voters at 46 percent for Brown and 48 percent for Whitman.

In the Senate race, Asian Americans supported Democrat Barbara Boxer with 59 percent over Republican Carly Fiorina with 34 percent, compared to white voters at 43 percent for Boxer and 50 percent for Fiorina.

“Candidates who won the Asian American and Latino vote succeeded on Election Day,” said Dan Ichinose, director of APALC’s demographic research project.

“In California, this meant that Democrats rode to victory on the backs of immigrant voters, including Asian American voters,” he noted.

The poll also confirmed a pattern observed in other research on Asian American voters — Asian Americans are more likely than any other group to register as “decline to state” voters, with 35 percent of Asian Americans compared to 21 percent of Latinos and 26 percent of whites.

“Asian American voters are a complex electorate, with shifting alignments that are not tied to a particular party or issue,” said Karin Wang, APALC’s vice president of programs and communications.

“With the rapid expansion of the Asian American electorate, we need more data like this, to allow an in-depth analysis of Asian American voting patterns and attitudes,” Wang added.

The poll was conducted immediately after the election and, with support from the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, included an oversample of Asian American voters, including those who speak Cantonese, Chinese Mandarin, Korean, Tagalog or Vietnamese.

The findings are based on a random-sample survey of 1,689 registered voters in the state of California conducted from November 3-14, 2010. A subset of 1,457 respondents were voters in the 2010 election.

Interviews were conducted by telephone using live interviewers from Interviewing Services of America. Voters were randomly selected from a list of registered voters statewide and reached on landline or cell phone depending on the number they designated on their voter registration.

The percentage of cell phone respondents in this study matches the percentage of those who list their cell phone on the voter file. Up to five attempts were made to reach and interview each randomly selected voter.

In order to include a wider range of questions in this study, some batteries of related questions were split into random half-samples, with one-half of 844 registered voters and the other half of 845 registered voters.