On December 12, 2021, the New York City Council passed Intro 1867. This iconic legislation provides an estimated 808,00 adult New Yorkers – who are green card holders and/or have work authorization – with immigrant municipal voting rights (IMVR).
New York’s bill reimagines the traditional Western linkage between voting and the city. The word citizen and its Spanish equivalent ciudadano both include the prefix city – underscoring the historical linkage between voting and urban place. Re-enacting this historical connection reshuffles, the political/electoral relations between the few and the many. It also re-visits the defunct practice of noncitizen voting rights in U.S. history, and may also serve as a template for other immigrant dense municipalities.
Noncitizen voting rights has a long historical arc in the United States. Throughout the 19th century, immigrant suffrage was a common practice in many states and U.S territories. In 1874, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled – in Minor vs. Happersett – that: “Citizenship has not in all cases been made a condition … to the enjoyment of the right to suffrage.” This determination was upheld by state and federal courts. Nonetheless, in light of late-19th century mass migration, rabid anti-immigrant sentiments, and the xenophobia associated with World War I, this democratic enhancing practice(s) was brought to an abrupt halt. Historically, this civic turnaround erupted at approximately the same time that White southern reactionaries imposed electoral disenfranchisement laws targeting Black voters.
Clearly, the right to vote has always been linked to the issue of who wields political power. Today, as in the past, the national/local political panorama is being unraveled by an anti-democratic White supremacy movement that militates to suppress the voting rights of people of color. Hard-right Republican zealots, in this context, will undoubtably attack New York’s IMVR legislation as a ploy by Democrats to: increase their electoral base, undermine voting integrity, and degrade the supposed citizenship/voting equation.
The Big Apple’s, 2020 presidential election outcomes undermine the working assumption that there exists a tight bond between immigrants and the Democratic Party. For example, global New York is overwhelmingly a Democratic town. Thirty-eight percent of New York residents are immigrants and are overwhelmingly registered as Democrats. Yet, during the last presidential election both Latinex Corona and Asian Flushing shifted their votes to the Republican, Donald Trump. Mainstream political pundits and analysts simplistically insist that immigrants intuitively tilt towards the cultural conservatism espoused by Republicans. This one-dimensional optic muddles the analysis of voter outcomes. A more granular bottom-up political-economic interpretation may hold more analytical water.
City and Queens-wide Democratic administrations have aggressively supported neo-liberal economic growth schemes that jump start neighborhood gentrification and working-class immigrant expulsions. Hence, an alternative perspective might suggest that voter defections – in gentrifying Corona and Flushing – are a vivid rejection of the Democratic Party’s disconnect between its idealized rhetoric of immigrant empowerment and neighborhood destruction. Allegiance to home and community can clearly be politically meaningful.
Clearly, municipal voting rights will electorally empower immigrants, but it will not – by default – align the immigrant vote with the Democratic Party and its regressive agenda of market-based neighborhood growth. Local political alignment will only be feasible if the Democratic machine is fundamentally restructured along inter-ethnic/class lines that validate humane aspirations at the neighborhood level.
The historical pendulum is swaying towards a more inclusive socio-political arrangement, nonetheless, much important political work remains. In the words of Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” And in this regard, immigrants and their allies hold the key to New York’s revitalization as a socially just city. ___________________________________________________________________________________
Arturo-Ignacio Sánchez, Ph.D. is an urban planner and the former chairperson of the “Newest New Yorker Committee” of Community Board 3, Queens. He has taught at Barnard College, City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, Pratt Institute, and various Latin American universities.
