New York City Poised To Become The Largest Municipality In The U.S. To Allow Noncitizens To Vote In Local Elections

The NYC council will vote on a measure today that would allow immigrants who are not U.S. citizens to vote for mayor and other key municipal positions, a historic move that is igniting threats of legal challenges from Republicans and hopes from Democrats that other cities will follow suit.

New York’s 51-member council is widely expected to approve the measure, and it would immediately grant noncitizens significant leverage over a broad array of elective offices, including the mayor, city council, comptroller, the public advocate and the leaders of the city’s five boroughs who oversee issues such as zoning.

Approximately 1 million adult noncitizens live in New York City, which amounts to 20% of current registered voters, though it remains unclear how many would be eligible to vote, according to census figures, academic estimates and the bill’s sponsor. To register, noncitizens must have lived here for 30 days, the same requirement for citizens, and have at least a work permit.

Noncitizens remain ineligible to vote for state and federal elections. Those in the United States illegally cannot vote. Anyone who violates the measure could face up to $500 in fines and a year in jail.

“The question is: Do you live in the city, are you proud to be here, do you contribute to the city?” said council member Ydanis Rodriguez, the measure’s sponsor and himself an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who became a naturalized citizen in 2000. “How dare someone be telling someone you should not have the right to vote.”

The city council vote is the culmination of years of advocacy that sought to restore voting rights that existed for other immigrants in the past, but has largely stagnated nationwide.

Fourteen smaller jurisdictions in the United States allow noncitizens to vote, mostly in Maryland, including Hyattsville and Takoma Park, but also in Vermont and for the school board in San Francisco. Cities such as Los Angeles, Washington and Portland, Maine, have floated the idea, said Ron Hayduk, political science professor at San Francisco State University and the author of “Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting in the U.S.”

Arizona, North Dakota, Florida, Colorado and Alabama ban noncitizen voting in their states, part of a parallel push by Republicans to prohibit such voting nationwide.

Republicans call the idea “radical” and vowed to fight it in court in New York and “all 50 states,” said Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in a recent statement. The RNC filed a lawsuit to block a new measure that allows noncitizens to vote in a pair of Vermont cities.

Joseph Borelli, one of a handful of Republicans on the New York City Council, said only U.S. citizens should vote for officials deciding sensitive matters such as taxes, the debt liability and zoning.

“I don’t think those things should be decided by foreign citizens,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is not about a stop sign on their corner.”

Rodriguez’s plan has the support of 35 of the 51 city council members – and the city allowed noncitizen parents to vote in school board elections as recently as 2002, when officials abolished the boards – but some Democrats are hesitant. Council member Ruben Diaz Sr. called the bill “dangerous and misguided” and tweeted that the “home to both the United Nations and Wall Street could easily be taken over by any group of noncitizens who live here for 30 days and vote for the leader of their choice.” His son, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., supports the plan, a spokeswoman said in an email.

Mayor Bill de Blasio also worried about the measure’s legality in a Nov. 29 interview with NY1 and predicted it would end up in court.

“I really want to make sure that there’s maximum incentive to finish the citizenship process,” de Blasio said. “I think there’s some open questions here that still cause me to feel concerned about this.”

Advocates say noncitizens should weigh in on city elections because they pay taxes, send their children to public schools and work here, especially during the coronavirus pandemic when so many fled the city.

Immigrants account for nearly 37% of the 8 million residents in New York City, census figures show, and city officials say almost 60% are naturalized citizens. The rest are green-card holders, temporary workers or students and undocumented immigrants.

Republicans say the state constitution says only citizens can vote, but historians say New York’s move is probably legal because noncitizens have voted, off and on, in the city and the country for more than 200 years, starting in the 1700s and picking up steam after the Civil War, when the majority of the city’s adult residents were from European nations such as Ireland, Germany and Italy.

“They believed that if you gave people the right to vote, they would be invested in American society, feel part of the process,” said Hiroshi Motomura, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, who wrote “Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States.”

Forty states allowed noncitizen voting from 1776 to 1926, Hayduk said. But noncitizen voting and immigration declined with new restrictions on immigration that effectively barred Chinese immigrants and restricted immigration for decades.

John Mollenkopf, a political science professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, said it is unclear how many noncitizens would actually register to vote or match the city’s eligibility criteria. But he estimated that the largest groups would be from China, followed by people from the Dominican Republic, and Caribbean nations such as Haiti and Jamaica.

He cautioned it also remains unclear which political party they might favor: Most Dominicans vote Democrat, but he estimates that more than a third of voters of Chinese descent do not declare a party.

On a graffiti-scarred street in Lower Manhattan, administrators at the Chinese-American Planning Council say having more immigrants vote could bring in more public funding for English classes.

Jinquan Zhang, a 33-year-old immigrant from China who took classes at the planning council and now works there, said the measure would instantly make him, his brother and their parents eligible to vote. All have green cards after arriving in 2017, and they have also been anxious about an increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in New York after President Donald Trump last year dubbed covid-19 the “Chinese virus.”

“I want to vote,” Zhang said, speaking haltingly in his newly acquired language, his third. “I want who can represent me to make my neighborhood better.”

Oscar Rodriguez, a 48-year-old truck driver from Honduras who has a temporary work permit but has lived in Queens since 1997, said the measure would double the number of city voters in his household to four people. If Congress grants millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States work permits this year – he’d prefer citizenship – his wife would be the fifth voter. All are Democrats.

“Of course, if I could vote, I would do it,” he said.

Sanjok Lama, 44, a folk singer from Nepal, and his daughter Dolma, who organizes South Asian immigrant workers in Jackson Heights in Queens, said he is open to various political parties.

“I prefer Democrats, but the Republicans are not bad on some issues,” he said as his daughter winced.

Ydanis Rodriguez, the measure’s sponsor, said over cups of steaming hot coffee in a mostly Dominican neighborhood in Manhattan that the city should embrace noncitizen voters. He recalled his start as an 18-year-old brought by his family to the United States. He didn’t know English and washed dishes to put himself through college. He became a high school history teacher, and now, an elected official soon to leave office because of term limits.

His proposal, he said, is no different from the one that centuries ago allowed new arrivals – for the most part, White men – from countries such as Ireland and Italy to vote.

“It’s not new,” he said.

Borelli, the GOP minority leader, who is from Staten Island, the borough with the lowest number of noncitizens, said his party will file a lawsuit to block Rodriguez’s measure from taking effect and will “probably win.”

But if they lose, he said, “we’ll be soliciting votes from any newly enfranchised New York voter.”

He acknowledged the doublespeak, but said the only other alternative is to give up.

“Don’t forget,” he said, “a lot of these people happen to be Republicans.”

(c) 2021, The Washington Post · Maria Sacchetti 

{Matzav.com}