If you had the misfortune of turning on most corporate news channels in the years following the 2016 election, you were undoubtedly subjected to what was later proven a lie: that Donald Trump was the puppet of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and that his electoral victory could be chalked up to foreign meddling in U.S. elections.
While the conspiracy theory of Russian collusion provoked an endless supply of moral indignation from talking heads, genuine instances of foreign meddling in our elections are celebrated as victories for democracy by a leftwing establishment that seems to disagree only on whether they should manage or accelerate our nation’s decline.
It appears that lawmakers in my hometown of San Jose have opted for acceleration. Situated in the middle of Silicon Valley, our country’s tenth largest city is preparing to sanctify foreign election meddling as a legal right, thereby desecrating American citizenship in the process.
The city, plagued by Mexican gang violence, persistent homelessness, and a startling degree of income inequality, may allow illegal immigrants to vote in local elections and serve on city boards. The city council, led by Mayor Sam Liccardo, recently voted to “direct city officials to study the potential impacts of changing the city charter to allow noncitizens the right to vote in municipal elections.” This policy will have to be approved by voters as a ballot measure. Should it pass, many of the estimated 157,876 illegally present foreign citizens in Santa Clara County will have a say in government affairs.
City Councilmember Dev Davis was the lone voice of reason when she remarked “[Noncitizens] have allegiance to another country,” continuing to say that “They, hopefully, wherever they come from, have the right to vote in that country.” The rest of the city council supported the measure without fail.
A Decision Rooted In Disdain For America
It’s no surprise that fabricated incidents of election meddling are used to delegitimize the election of a Republican while actual policies that would legalize it are supported openly by elected officials. This isn’t hypocrisy, it’s the exertion of power. It’s how a hostile ruling regime, not simply a ruling party, conducts itself when it has set out to crush you.
Any motion to deliberately empower foreign influences, and thereby disempower American citizens, can only be motivated by a disdain for our country and those who rightfully inhabit it. There wasn’t even an attempt by the San Jose City Council to conceal this disdain.
A document from the city council reads “To say that our undocumented immigrant community is our strength is not doing them justice.” No, people who broke U.S. laws are not just our strength, they’re better than you. The council continues, holding American citizens in contempt when they write that illegal immigrants “are the foundation upon which we have built our nation and city.”
Illegal immigrants are the foundation of our country, they write. Not California’s pioneers or gold-panners. Not the settlers who braved the Oregon Trail or the soldiers who braved enemy forces. Not any of the people who built up the world’s greatest country out of an untamed continent. Not those who played by the rules to become American citizens. The foundation of our country is those who illegally benefited from their sacrifices.
Meanwhile, the actual foundation of the city and country is regarded with hatred. Christopher Columbus was one of the first casualties in San Jose, just as he has been in so many other cities. What’s worse, the city council voted unanimously to tear down a statue of Thomas Fallon, the first man to raise an American flag over San Jose after he rallied a volunteer force that took the city for the United States without violence during the Mexican-American War.
Instead of venerating Fallon, who was also briefly the mayor of the city, San Jose venerates an Aztec god with a monument that is bluntly referred to by locals and the media as “the poop statue.”
Disenfranchising Americans For Democracy’s Sake
As with so many leftwing advances, a moral patina is used to render a patently absurd idea publicly palatable. The buzzwords tell the story. The city council says they intend to “expand representative democracy” and “add to the legacy of justice.” But expanding democracy beyond America’s legal population is a great injustice.
For our neo-liberal elite, democracy is an expedient buzzword, not a moral commitment. When it becomes inconvenient, they have no qualms about overriding the public’s will.
Can’t change the minds of the voters? Just change out the voters themselves through illegal mass immigration while pursuing policies that defile American citizenship for the sake of leftwing power. This is the strategy that turned California blue in the first place and now threatens to deliver Georgia, North Carolina, and even Texas to the Democratic Party.
A Neo Liberal Paradise
Home to both tent cities and tech oligarchs, San Jose is heaven for our neoliberal establishment, which is to say that it has become hell for the shrinking middle class. This latest move, insultingly marketed as a necessary implication of a sincere commitment to democratic principles, is a power grab for the neo-liberals who control the region.
Notice how the city council justifies foreign meddling in our elections. Once you cut through the usual rhetoric, you’re told that illegal immigrants have the right to cancel out the votes of American citizens because some of them pay taxes.
They explain that “it is estimated that in 2018, immigrants in the San Jose metro area – a portion of which are undocumented – brought in $5.3 billion in state and local taxes alone.” Meanwhile, illegal immigration costs the United States an astonishing estimated $116 billion dollars every year, just shy of the combined annual GDP of Lithuania and Belarus.
Even if illegal immigration really did help the U.S. economy, is this really the precedent they’d like to set? That the right to vote is something that is to be bought through paying taxes or is somehow tethered to your ability to produce? Are we to disenfranchise people who are net negatives on government budgets or give out extra votes to those who pay more?
This neo-liberal understanding only sees people as dollars and cents, producers and consumers whose dignity corresponds to their economic or political expediency.
To those who lead international corporations like the ones that gave Silicon Valley its name, borders don’t protect a home because to them America isn’t a home — it’s a global shopping mall. Immigration laws and the national confidence to enforce them are just impediments to the importation of foreign labor or a more agreeable voting block.
To me, my family, and so many others, San Jose has been our home despite all its flaws. It’s people like us whose voices may very well be nullified by foreign influence in our elections.
The city, and in fact our very nation, was built by brave men like Fallon. Now men like Mayor Sam Liccardo and the amalgamation of woke and corporate influences he represents are doing what they can to tear it down.
