Voting foot in the door for illegals.

McMinnville OR

Description

ast week was a momentous one for voting rights in America, and not just because of President Joe Biden’s urgent (if unsuccessful) plea for Congress to pass legislation protecting access to the ballot. More than 800,000 people in New York City gained the right to vote with the enactment of a new law allowing legal noncitizens to participate in municipal elections. The law represents one of the biggest single expansions of voting rights in recent years, as well as an enormous victory for immigrants in the nation’s largest city. But Americans didn’t hear about it in Biden’s speech in Atlanta. Nor would they know about it from listening to congressional Democratic leaders who have championed both the party’s election overhaul and liberal treatment of immigrants. Indeed, few prominent Democrats seem interested in discussing New York City’s law at all; over the past two weeks, I asked a range of party leaders—members of the city’s congressional delegation, the chairs of the congressional Hispanic, Black, and Asian American and Pacific Islander caucuses, the White House—to weigh in on the law and whether immigrant voting rights should be a topic of national debate. Hardly any would agree (or, officially, make time in their busy schedules) to speak on the hot potato issue. Although Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, the fourth-ranking House Democrat and a potential future speaker, has publicly backed the measure, other well-known New York Democrats, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have said nothing about it. The new law represents one of the starkest recent examples of the bifurcated policies on voting and immigration that have emanated from states and cities in the absence of action on each issue by Congress. As Republican-led governments have restricted access to the ballot and the rights of immigrants, Democratic strongholds have moved aggressively in the other direction. (The New York law applies only to people who have legal status in the U.S. and have resided in the city for at least 30 days. It does not confer voting rights to undocumented immigrants.) “We believe that New York needs to lead the way in this moment to demonstrate that while folks are trying to limit our democracy, we’re trying to expand it,” Murad Awawdeh, the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, told me. National Democrats often applaud efforts such as the expansion of mail balloting in blue states and allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. Their silence on New York City’s immigrant-voting law, however, likely reflects an ambivalence by the city’s own leadership and national advocates for immigration reform about both the political wisdom of the policy and its constitutionality. “It is a fraught debate,” Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at New York University’s Migration Policy Institute, told me. “It has actually gotten less introspection in New York City than it deserves, and I think part of it is that it is politically incorrect to raise doubts about anything that on its face looks pro-immigrant.”