“The GOP Is Panicking Over Noncitizen Voting. It’s Imaginary,” read a headline in New York Magazine this past February. The article maligned Republican efforts to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. New York Magazine accused Republicans of focusing on a “phantom menace of noncitizen voting.”
Fast forward seven months and New York Magazine has gone from claiming that noncitizen voting is “imaginary” to asking “Why is noncitizen voting so terrifying?”
NY Magazine’s Zak Cheney-Rice focuses his latest piece on New York City’s Local Law 11, which would have allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections before it was shot down by the state’s highest court. The legislation would have made roughly 800,000 noncitizens eligible for voting for offices like council or mayor. Those eligible would have included lawful permanent residents and others authorized to work in the United States who had been living in the city for at least 30 days.
This law was in no way an “imaginary” change. In fact, it was a real point of contention that had been around long before New York Magazine’s February article dismissing noncitizen voting as “imaginary.” Had the law gone into effect, noncitizens could have constituted a significant part of the Big Apple electorate and could have exceeded margins of victory in tight local races — not an “imaginary” problem by any means.
And while the SAVE America Act pertains to federal elections and the New York City law regarded local elections, the distinction still doesn’t change the fact that in February, New York Magazine treated Republican concerns about noncitizen voting as a “phantom” hysteria rooted in white supremacy. Yet now when discussing Democrats’ past efforts to allow noncitizens to vote, New York Magazine doesn’t merely acknowledge the “imaginary” problem is actually real — instead, it tries to convince readers that preventing noncitizen voting is actually evil and that maybe this Democrat-backed legislation to allow noncitizens to vote was the right move all along.
Cheney-Rice frames his pro-noncitizen voting story through the story of Ydanis Rodriguez, a councilman who sponsored the legislation. Rodriguez immigrated from the Dominican Republic, lived in the United States on a green card, and “paid taxes” and “was part of the community, but could not vote” until he was granted citizenship in 2000.
“Was citizenship,” Cheney-Rice asked, “really what turned him from someone who was not qualified to help choose the mayor into someone who was?”
Yes. That is precisely what citizenship did.
Citizenship formally made Rodriguez a member of the American political community. It was a gift given to Rodriguez. America owed him nothing. That Rodriguez paid taxes did not entitle him to a ballot. Despite Cheney-Rice’s angling, paying taxes was not a favor Rodriguez performed for Americans, it was the obligation that came with being allowed to live in and work in the country that generously chose to let him live here. But voting is not — nor should be– a reward for paying taxes.
Nonetheless, Cheney-Rice takes Rodriguez’s framing that noncitizen voting is “about giving people who pay taxes dignity and respect.”
The framing implies that protecting voting for citizens only is now apparently a denial of “dignity and respect.” In other words, opposition to noncitizen voting puts you on the wrong side of this moral dilemma: either you “respect” someone and their “dignity” and let them vote, or you don’t let them vote because you deny their “dignity” and don’t “respect” them. It’s the same emotional blackmail seen when Democrats demand Americans pay billions in foreign aid.
But this is the first step in Cheney-Rice’s propaganda tirade: turn a legitimate dispute about political rights into a story about how these poor sympathetic immigrants are victims who are being denied “dignity” and “respect” by evil Americans.
Cheney-Rice furthers the victim narrative by making one of the most insane comparisons of all time: not wanting foreigners to vote in your election is akin to the Civil War.
“Confederates banned immigrant suffrage during the Civil War because they thought migrating Europeans were anti-slavery, while northern states rolled back voting rights in reaction to waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century, which they associated with crime,” Cheney-Rice wrote. While he doesn’t explicitly say anyone who opposes noncitizen voting is bigoted, racist, or whatever other slur he clearly associates with the Confederacy or Americans in the 18th and 19th century, his point of invoking these examples is to equate opposition of noncitizen voting to Confederates, knowing the historical weight of such comparison. It’s guilt by association: if you don’t want to be thought of as a Confederate, you must allow noncitizens to rule you.
The article’s purpose — or should I say, propaganda — becomes more clear when Cheney-Rice tries to argue that “noncitizens … remain an ineradicable part of this country.”
“We depend on their labor and tax dollars to function but, on a policy level at least, keep them trapped in legal limbo,” he writes. “They are unable to consent to how they are governed and are prevented from becoming full citizens so they can have a say.”
The point is clear: Americans are evil people who have “trapped” foreigners who willingly came here, exploit their labor to sustain our economy (which, by the way, isn’t true, which is why Cheney-Rice provides no source for such bogus claim), and then deny them the ability to “consent” to the government under which they live. The implication is that giving them access to elections is the least we can do for this supposed injustice. The propaganda is useful if you want to sell noncitizen voting but it’s not a serious telling of the situation.
Foreign nationals who choose to live in the United States do not have some inherent right to determine our laws and govern us. No one who voluntarily chooses to immigrate here is “trapped” and further, their voluntary immigration is their way of consenting to living under our laws. If they do not like it, they can leave or try to apply for citizenship. But simply living in the United States does not entitle a foreigner to citizenship or the benefits of it. And if it does, then why limit the ballot access to green card holders or people with work authorization? Why not people on temporary visas? Why require 30 days of residency? What is the limiting principle?
Of course there is no logical limiting principle except using citizenship as the requirement.
In fact, the article itself provides an example that inadvertently demonstrates why citizenship matters. Cheney-Rice recounts a 1986 school board voting drive that “registered 10,000 parents, most of whom were Dominican immigrants, ahead of an upcoming school-board election. The impact was immediate. New voters helped elect as school-board president Guillermo Linares, the first Dominican to ever hold public office in the U.S. Neighborhood schools that for years had been neglected saw an influx of investment, including more funding and after-school programs. The difference was not that the government suddenly cared more about immigrants. The difference was that noncitizens — who in all other meaningful respects were everyday New Yorkers — had the power to defend their own interests.”
It was supposed to be an argument for noncitizen voting but really it’s the clearest argument against noncitizen voting: when noncitizens get enough electoral power to organize around their shared interest, it redirects American money toward foreign-based priorities of immigrants — not Americans.
Cheney-Rice does, however, briefly concede the dangers of noncitizen voting.
“There are plenty of valid reasons why such a right would be restricted to national citizens. The very idea of a sovereign nation would be undermined if the people dictating its priorities were foreigners who could simply drop into the country on Election Day. Yet it felt increasingly like the most salient question was the one skeptics weren’t asking: Why shouldn’t people who’ve made the U.S. their home have some authority over their political fate?”
The answer to this question is that just because foreigners decided to make US their home doesn’t mean Americans must give these foreigners permission to rule us.
A nation has a right to decide who gets to join its political community, and Americans have the right to reserve control of their government to citizens and not foreign nationals. If we adopt Cheney-Rice’s position, then citizenship is entirely meaningless if any foreigner can come here and change our laws.
But the most revealing part of this whole story is that it exposes New York Magazine’s propaganda. When Republicans were pushing the SAVE America Act to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, the magazine declared concerns about noncitizen voting “imaginary.” Those concerns were nothing ore than a manufactured panic by Republicans to justify supposed voter suppression legislation. Seven months later, when the subject is about Democrats’ desire to let 800,000 noncitizens vote, noncitizen voting is suddenly very real and apparently a good thing. In fact, it’s such a good thing that Cheney-Rice has to resort to moral blackmail to make such a point!
It’s not that noncitizen voting was “imaginary” in February but then became real over the past few months. The difference is that New York Magazine has an agenda.
