Nicholas Christos slathered more sauce on an order of souvlaki and gestured from his food cart toward the multiethnic throng in front of him on Main Street.
"I'm telling them, I wish they would wake up," he declared. "They better learn more about politics. Ten percent of the people control this country, and the rest are dummies!"
But when Mr. Christos, who left his native Greece decades ago, confessed that he himself had not yet decided which presidential candidate would get his vote, his customers in Flushing, Queens, proved that they were wide awake.
"Better not be Nader!" put in one young man with a flourish of his shish kebab stick.
"That's too close, Kerry and Bush," chimed in Rene Franco, a Colombian immigrant, his mouth still full of hot dog. "Think about immigration policy."
Like Mr. Christos and many of his customers, more than 1.2 million citizens of voting age in New York are foreign born, the last census showed - 27 percent and growing. A recent registration drive by the New York Immigration Coalition signed up 225,000 immigrant voters. But even among those who cannot vote, immigrants and their advocates say, this election has captured their interest like few in memory.
"Everybody's paying attention, trust me!" said Narisha Mohammed, 29, a United States citizen from Trinidad, who stopped to talk about immigrant anxieties on her way to an evening shift at the front desk of the Queens Public Library's Flushing branch.
Her views echoed the assessment of John Mollenkopf, a political scientist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
"They're diverse, just like native-born voters are diverse," he said of the city's foreign-born residents. "But various immigrant groups, even those that are not Muslim or even South Asian, feel their status is somewhat more precarious in the United States after 9/11.''
That kind of anxiety turned into laughter during an evening of Arab-American stand-up comedy at a Midtown comedy club last week, as Dean Obeidallah and Maysoon Zayid warmed up fans with political humor.
There were cracks like the one about Laura Bush and Teresa Heinz Kerry wearing the same outfit at one of the debates. "Somebody's stylist is going to Guantanamo," Ms. Zayid deadpanned.
Mr. Obeidallah went on to lament the hardships of being Arab-American: African-Americans get Black History Month, he said, and Hispanics get Hispanic Awareness Week. "And what do we get?" he asked plaintively. "Orange Alert."
The evening was part of a four-day Arab-American cultural festival that was held in November last year but was deliberately moved up this year before the election, Mr. Obeidallah said.
"It's not just about selling 700 tickets, it's about organizing the community," he explained, describing himself as a John Kerry supporter. In 2000, he said, American Muslims went overwhelmingly for George W. Bush; this year polls show them swinging to Mr. Kerry.
In some quarters, of course, language or cultural divides make the election seem far away. In a popular Pakistani restaurant in a basement adjacent to a Manhattan mosque on West 29th Street, for example, the patrons and staff showed surprise on Oct. 13 when a visitor asked if the television set would be tuned to the final presidential debate later that evening.
"We only get local channels," one of the servers said, as customers filed in from evening prayers.
"Local channels - local South Asian channels," one of the diners clarified with a smile, pointing out that the old movie playing on the wide-screen television was a Bollywood melodrama.
For many immigrants, however, the presidential debates were simply not to be missed. François Darbouze, 51, a New York cabdriver who lives in New Jersey and hails from Haiti, not only planned to watch the final presidential debate, he also was taping every word.
"Some countries are in trouble and they hardly mention it," he complained, referring to Haiti's latest hardships.
"The father didn't do anything for my country," he added, referring to the first President Bush. "This one, he did not appreciate what Clinton had been doing."
But old world loyalties only go so far, warned Akin Talbi, an Algerian immigrant who is a photographer and drives a pedicab near Times Square for $1 a minute. Mr. Talbi, 38, complained that the imam at his mosque had urged the faithful to vote neither for Mr. Bush nor Mr. Kerry.
"I didn't like it because they're mixing religion and politics," Mr. Talbi said. "Last time they pushed people to vote for Bush. Now they're telling me to vote against Bush."
"Maybe I'm going to vote for Bush," he added in a defiant tone.
Later the same evening, a debate-watching session organized by the Hunter College Israel Public Affairs Committee drew more than 125 with a giant screen, home-baked cookies and "Campaign 2004" T-shirts. Many in the crowd were Jewish immigrants, including Steven Yuniver, 19, the president of the sponsoring group, and Anna Blyakher, 20, the chairwoman.
"I can't vote yet," lamented Ms. Blyakher, who left Ukraine for Brooklyn five years ago. "But I would vote for Bush. Bush is more there for Israel."
Mr. Yuniver, who was 5 when his family moved to New York from Odessa, said he would cast his first vote ever for John Kerry. As red, white and blue light from the screen flickered over the audience, Mr. Yuniver warmed to the theme, citing the need for jobs, universal health care and a different way of dealing with Iraq.
"John Kerry was for the war," he asserted. "But he would have done it the way Clinton got rid of Slobodan Milosevic."
Other immigrant students in the audience were more concerned with policies that shape their own lives.
"What about us?" asked Inez Moran, a 41-year-old freshman from the Dominican Republic, complaining like many immigrants that neither candidate had said enough about immigration policy. "The immigrant now is the one who is suffering. In our family we have a case of someone who lived here 20 years, paid taxes, and he was deported."
Tynisha James, 27, a media major from St. Kitts who become a citizen in 1996, confessed that in the last election she was so ambivalent about the candidates that she did not vote. "I'll be voting for the first time," Ms. James declared after the debate, "and I'm excited."
Nationally, newly naturalized citizens accounted for more than half the net growth in persons registered to vote between 1996 and 2000, according to a new report by the Immigration Policy Center, a research organization affiliated with groups that have supported easing restrictions on legal immigration. But out of 10.7 million adult new citizens in the United States in 2000, only 6.2 million were registered to vote and 5.4 million actually voted, the report said.
On the last stop of the No. 7 train, in the markets along Main Street in Queens, anyone who can speak enough English to voice a political opinion seems ready to offer it these days.
Eunju Jung, from Korea, was no exception. "I don't like Bushie," she said, inadvertently using what Jenna Bush has called her parents' favorite endearment. "From Bushie, every policy is getting worse, is getting very strict."
Some immigrants who cannot vote feel so strongly about the election that they are working as volunteers to get others to the polls. One is Cynthia Neita, 42, a homecare worker and 1199 union activist who has been living out of a suitcase in Ohio since April.
In a telephone interview from Cincinnati, Ms. Neita, a Jamaican who usually lives in New Jersey, said she was so disappointed that her citizenship application was stuck in the Department of Homeland Security naturalization backlog that she volunteered for a union program to register new voters in swing states.
"I'm doing door knocking," she said. "I'm doing registration. I'm doing phone banking. I'm doing outreach in the churches in the black community here. I decided to do this because I wanted to make a difference in somebody's life."
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