Could 2016 be the year for San Diego's refugee communities to shine? A group of nonprofit organizations and some city council members hope so. This campaign season, they've been holding voter drives and launching outreach campaigns aimed at increasing voter turnout among the city's refugee population. And on Tuesday, they’ll see just how well their efforts have paid off.
Most of San Diego's refugees—whether Burmese, Iraqi, Somali or Vietnamese—live in the diverse City Heights neighborhood. That community has also historically had the lowest turnout in San Diego—a phenomenon that nonprofits like the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans and the Environmental Health Coalition hope to change.
If these groups can succeed in getting more of them to the polls Tuesday, it could have reverberations beyond the June 7 election. According to the Advancement of New Americans, these asylum seekers become "supervoters" once they participate in an election, meaning they rarely miss or sit another out. But because they aren’t a monolithic voting group, the real nature of the impact remains to be seen.
There are an estimated 825,000 refugees currently living in California and many of them call San Diego home. This year, they watched as the issue of émigrés became a flashpoint in American politics amid the turmoil in Syria. Soon, they could be a decisive factor in local races.
Read more about the push for higher voter turnout in San Diego’s refugee communities here.
Image Credit: Flickr User scelera, https://flic.kr/p/8QMEUG via (CC BY-ND 2.0)