With the cost of applications for citizenship going up and the fight in the Senate last week over illegal immigration more legal immigrants are applying for citizenship.

The measure, a bipartisan compromise supported by President Bush, would have created a path to legal status for illegal immigrants, among other actions.

After it failed, Mr. Álvarez, a real estate agent from Whittier, Calif., took down information from El Piolín’s show and registered in a citizenship workshop.

“I realized that I want to be able to vote and speak up for my people, because they are not getting enough support,” Mr. Álvarez said yesterday in a telephone interview. “I want everybody to be able to come out of the shadows.”

Federico Gutiérrez, 53, a longtime legal resident of Chicago who was born in Mexico, said large protests in March 2006 in support of an immigration overhaul made him decide that it was time to engage in American politics.

When the debate turned angry, Mr. Gutiérrez said, he wanted to be able to influence lawmakers who he believed favored immigrants.

He prepared his application and brushed up on his English and American history in classes offered by the New Americans Initiative, a citizenship campaign financed by Illinois. He became a citizen in May.

“Now if I don’t like the way things are going, I can let the government know my opinion,” Mr. Gutiérrez said in a telephone interview.

Some legal immigrants, particularly Hispanics, have said they were unfairly tarred in the debate over the Senate bill, which failed in part because of vehement opposition from conservatives who said it offered blanket amnesty to illegal immigrants.

“A lot of people who are here legally are made to feel like lepers,” said Rachel Duverge, 24, a Florida resident born in the Dominican Republic who was among the new citizens sworn in yesterday at Walt Disney World.

Ms. Duverge said she became a citizen in part because she was eager to vote in the presidential election next year. President Bush, she said, “has not handled immigration well.”

It seems Bush can’t win for losing. He supported the bill but is being criticized by those he supported because the Senate couldn’t get the bill passed. And the whiners on the right wing will just whine louder when these new citizens vote for Democrats.

To become citizens, immigrants have to be legal permanent residents who have lived continuously in the United States for five years. They cannot have a criminal record and must pass tests to show proficiency in English and a basic knowledge of American history and government.

If I had to take a test to become an American citizen I’d like to think I could pass it, but from what I’ve seen from comments on other sites a lot of American-born people don’t know our history or simple civics.

To our newest citizens I say “Welcome to America where you can be anything you put your mind to being.”