NYC Allows Legal Immigrants to Vote in City Elections

The New York City Council has overwhelmingly approved a bill to allow more than 800,000 lawfully present immigrants to vote in municipal elections, becoming the largest U.S. city to do so. As a founding member of the New York Coalition to Expand Voting Rights, created in 2003 to research, recommend, and advocate for the ideas that culminated in this new policy, I could not be prouder. Even though I moved to Chicago in 2014, part of my heart will always remain in New York City and I am so happy that New Yorkers who support vibrant democracy have finally carried this initiative over the finish lines.

If this is the first time you are hearing about noncitizen voting –which was widespread in the U.S. until early in the twentieth century– please wait before you pass judgment. Many of the arguments of opponents simply do not hold water. The word “citizen” comes from the days when people’s allegiances lay with their cities because nations did not yet exist. The NYC policy does not allow voting in state or federal elections, so does not remove an incentive for recent immigrants to become U.S. citizens. To the contrary, it helps prepare them to become full federal citizens as they wait until they are eligible.

Below is the testimony that I delivered to the New York City Council for November 14, 2005 hearings on Intro. 628, the first bill introduced in favor of municipal voting rights for lawfully present non-citizens.

“Why the Voting Rights Restoration Act (Intro. 628) Is Good for New York City”

Thank you for the opportunity to testify on why New York City should allow non-citizens who reside legally in this city to vote in municipal elections. My name is Michele Wucker and I am a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at The New School, where my research focuses on immigration and citizenship issues, particularly on how immigrants integrate into their host communities, on the policies that can promote or retard that process, and on the consequences. With Ron Hayduk, I am a co-founder and co-director of the Immigrant Voting Project (www.immigrantvoting.org), which documents and analyzes the initiatives to enfranchise non-citizens around the United States and the world, both throughout history and during a revival of the practice that began in the 1960s and accelerated in the 1990s through the present.

You’ve heard important testimony today about rights, democracy, and the ways that non-citizens would benefit from being given a voice in the city’s affairs. But I wouldn’t blame you, or your constituents, for asking, “What’s in it for me?”

All New Yorkers should care whether or not non-citizen New Yorkers can vote in city elections for the same reason that we care whether anybody votes at all. It’s not at all hard to see why people are alarmed that the voter turnout last week was below 40% and the lowest in five mayoral elections. Municipal voter participation reflects how much residents care about the city where they live and how much of a stake they feel they have. A recent New York Times Magazine article argued that, given that the likely benefit to any one individual of casting a vote is tiny, it’s a wonder that anyone votes at all. The broader community benefits far more than any individual does when he or she casts a vote.

In Fall 2003, the Los Angeles community of Lynwood, where 44% of voting-age residents are not citizens, discovered the hard way what happens when a large part of the community is disenfranchised. Taxpayers were funding Lynwood City Council members’ exorbitant salaries, fancy meals and junkets to Rio de Janeiro and Hawaii. The whole city suffered because the local government was not accountable to all of its residents.

When a city fails to create engaged local citizens, the consequences can be devastating, as has been happening in the immigrant suburbs of Paris. Similarly, the 1992 Washington Heights riots here in New York City were caused in part because community residents were isolated from the rest of the city and felt they had little say or influence over policies that affected them. The solution was to develop policies to address residents’ needs. In Washington, D.C.’s Adams Morgan neighborhood in 1991, ethnically charged riots inspired several suburbs to respond by granting local voting rights to noncitizen residents as a way of making sure that their concerns were addressed before they reached a breaking point.

When I first heard about the idea of noncitizen voting rights, my reaction was similar to the one I often get today when I tell others about the work of the Immigrant Voting Project and the New York Coalition to Expand Voting Rights. Why would someone bother to become a citizen if they already enjoyed the right to vote? While it is an understandable reaction, because Americans are far more likely to vote in national elections than local ones, it also is mistaken. The New York movement, like many similar ones across the country, only involves city-level voting rights; you still must be a citizen to vote for, say, President of the United States.

Adopting a new nationality is an emotional and very personal decision. Legal residents must wait five years before they can even apply to become a naturalized citizen, a long and often frustrating process. For many immigrants, the big hurdle in deciding to apply for naturalization is emotional: when they say the Pledge of Allegiance, they want to mean it. They want to feel like they belong to a place before they do the paperwork and undergo a process that is so complicated and frustrating that only those who really want to be citizens will go through. Giving incipient Americans a voice in their communities is a way to create involved, educated citizens at the local level, which will encourage many of them to go on to become U.S. citizens as well. At the same time, by cultivating all immigrants as citizens of this great city, New York will benefit immensely by welcoming into our civic life even those individuals who may not ever naturalize.

Becoming a “citizen of the city” is very different, both emotionally and in terms of results, from being a citizen of a nation. While it is only logical to think long and hard before changing their nationality, people are arguably citizens of a new city the minute that they take a job, sign a lease, enroll their children in schools, or begin a school semester of their own. Everyone who lives in a city immediately have an interest in securing safe and clean streets, good schools, and reliable and affordable transportation and health care. City officials’ decisions have immediate and tangible effects on the daily lives of every single resident: whether we have to walk through garbage or pass by crack dealers on the corner, how long we have to wait at the bus stop or subway station. We cannot afford to wait until the newest New Yorkers become U.S. citizens to make them full citizens of the city.

All residents depend on their neighbors being willing and able to participate in making sure that elected officials know what their needs are and meet them. Last year, I moved to Washington Heights, a neighborhood that is heavily populated by recent immigrants who, because of their citizenship status, cannot vote. I had to depend on the “A” train, which I quickly learned was unreliable at best. But, because the residents of Washington Heights had only a limited political voice, nobody expected more frequent or reliable train service any time soon. Meanwhile, lower Washington Heights finally succeeded in ending the skip-stop 9 train and increasing 1 train service, a feat achieved only when the number of likely voters to be courted hit critical mass. I think about the businesses that depend on reliable transportation for their workers no matter what their citizenship status and about the citizens who cannot get the services they need because their neighbors have no voices. And in these examples, I hope that you too will see clearly the answer to the question, “What’s in it for me?”

BuzzFeed News on the Dominican Republic, the US, and Citizenship

BuzzFeed reporter Emily Tamkin interviewed Michele Wucker and quoted her in Trump Wants To Cancel Birthright Citizenship. The US Has Already Helped One Country Do That, a November 12, 2018 article about the Dominican Republic’s stripping of citizenship to Dominicans of Haitian descent.

Donald Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship by executive order was immediately denounced by legal scholars as an illegal intrusion on the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. But the United States knows something about ending birthright citizenship because it played an active role in helping another country bring it to a close — the Dominican Republic.

That role, which was unfolding before Trump became president, has long been the subject of criticism — from the Organization of American States, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and former Peace Corps volunteers who served in Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Trump’s criticism of birthright citizenship and call for a wall on the US–Mexico border have renewed concerns that the US is inflaming the Dominican Republic’s already hostile xenophobic attitudes toward its Haitian minority.

:

“US human rights organizations were very vocal against the court ruling in 2013, and were very vocal in documenting some of the problems, particularly as it came into force in 2015,” Michele Wucker, author of Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola, said.

Read the whole article on Buzzfeed.

Japan Times article on non-citizen voting

Japan Times

Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2010
How the rest of the world deals with aliens at the ballot box
By SARAH NOORBAKHSH

Excerpt:

Acknowledging the rights of immigrant groups, “recognizing special ties among particular groups of countries” and reciprocation are often part and parcel of granting suffrage, says Michele Wucker, executive director of the World Policy Institute. The EU, the Commonwealth, Brazil, Portugal and Spain are cases in point. However, the decision in South Korea had the effect of enfranchising mostly Taiwanese immigrants rather than being a “quid pro quo” reform benefiting Japan, and the country has thus far only indicated that it hopes for a similar move here in Japan. Also worth noting is that whereas 6,000 noncitizens benefited from the law change in South Korea, there are over 900,000 permanent foreign residents in Japan, including over 400,000 “special permanent residents” — mostly Koreans and Taiwanese who lived in Japan before and during the war, as well as their descendants.

So what about the argument that, rather than give voting rights to permanent residents, they should be encouraged to naturalize instead? This attitude is prevalent in North America, where noncitizen voting rights have been rolled back. In contrast, Chile introduced alien suffrage to in part to compensate for its slow, inefficient nationalization system.

“If people feel that they are part of a community with their neighbors, then they are more likely to embrace national values and even apply for citizenship as well,” suggests Wucker. Indeed, movements in Toronto as well as Rome have used this argument in pressing for the involvement of immigrant groups in local politics, though demonstrating objectively that granting foreigners the vote leads to an increased demand for naturalization has proved a challenge.

CLICK TO READ FULL STORY

Beyond Relief: Council on Foreign Relations Haiti panel Feb 18

Video, audio, and transcript from “Beyond Relief: Helping Haiti,” a Council on Foreign Relations panel discussion in which Michele participated February 18, 2010.

Beyond Relief: Helping Haiti (Transcript)

Beyond Relief: Helping Haiti (Audio)

Speakers:

Pamela Cox, Vice President, Latin America and the Caribbean Region, World Bank Group

Arvind Subramanian, Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics

Michele Wucker, Executive Director, World Policy Institute

Presider:

Marcus Mabry, International Business Editor, New York Times

Watch experts discuss the political and economic challenges facing Haiti and the role foreign aid can play in the country’s recovery and development.

Jan 26: Linking Ethics and Self-Interest in Human Mobility

Published in Carnegie Council Policy Innovations

part of a collection from the December “The Right to Move?” conference in Tokyo.

January 26, 2010

Facing demographic and economic challenges, countries around the world are reconsidering the policies that govern migrant rights—the basis on which people are allowed to enter a country, the access that non-citizens have to services and rights, and the ability of non-citizens to naturalize. Decisions about who gets the right to move have significant consequences for the citizens, societies, and economies of host and sending countries alike.

The central question for many countries is: Who is admitted and how? In countries where ethnicity or family ties are priority criteria, the ethics of deciding who enters are closely tied to national conceptions of self-interest and identity. Sometimes these conceptions conflict, as Germany found when reconciling its long-standing policy of admitting people based on blood ties with its national desire to provide hospice to refugees. Admissions decisions also have consequences for sending countries which in turn ripple back to host countries when borders are weak and economic pull is strong.

Immigration rights advocates often make a moral argument for liberalizing immigration policy. No matter how good the moral case is, however, under the fraught politics of immigration the only arguments that will succeed are those that make a strong case for the self-interest of the host society. Yet the moral arguments are not necessarily opposed to self-interest; in fact, they often coincide. Continue reading “Jan 26: Linking Ethics and Self-Interest in Human Mobility”

U.S. and European Perspectives on Immigration

The American Council on Germany, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the World Policy Institute and Demos present
“U.S. and European Perspectives on Immigration: A Problem or an Opportunity?”

a discussion and luncheon featuring

Delancey Gustin, Immigration and Integration Program, The German Marshall Fund of the United States
and
Michele Wucker, Executive Director, World Policy Institute


This event comes on the heels of the release of Transatlantic Trends: Immigration, which compares transatlantic as well as cross-country opinion on immigration and integration issues. Some of the topics included in this year’s survey are: public perception of immigrants’ labor market impacts and effects on wages, the effect of the economic crisis on attitudes toward immigration, and preferences for temporary vs. permanent labor migration programs. The survey also gauges opinion on a legalization program for illegal immigrants and asks respondents to rate their governments’ current job of immigration management.

When:
Wednesday, January 27
12:15 – 2 PM

Where:
Demos
220 Fifth Avenue (between 26th and 27th streets)
Fifth Floor conference room
New York, New York

RSVP: This lunch and event are free and open to the public, but advance registration is required to reserve a seat and help us minimize waste when ordering.  RSVP by e-mailing events@worldpolicy.org or calling 212.481.5005 option 2.

“Breaking the Immigration Stalemate” report released

As many of you know, I was back and forth to Washington, DC many times over the past year to take part in an unusual gathering of scholars and thinkers on immigration policy. The Brookings-Duke Immigration Policy Roundtable organizers, Noah Pickus, Peter Skerry and Bill Galston convened a group as diverse as possible without members being likely to strangle each other by being in the same room –but they weren’t far off! The idea was to see what this disparate bunch could agree on (or at least agree to disagree on), in hopes that it might provide some guidance to the Obama administration as it tackles long-overdue immigration reform. We made it through somehow with a report that would have been different had I (or any of us) written it ourselves. Nevertheless, it gives a pretty good sense of some of the tradeoffs that might be politically feasible and result in a policy that, while not perfect, would significantly improve upon the mess that we have now.

That report, available in PDF format here, was released October 6. Links to the executive summary, the Spanish version, and the Brookings launch event transcript are available here. I’ll be part of a panel discussing it further at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC on October 23.

Here’s more information about the report:

Breaking the Immigration Stalemate

Breaking the Immigration Stalemate

The Obama administration has committed itself to immigration reform. Yet despite all the shortcomings of current policy — threats to the rule of law, exploitation of vulnerable newcomers, real and perceived competition with Americans for jobs and public resources — reasonable compromise on immigration will be exceedingly difficult. The divide between elite and public opinion on this issue remains deep and wide. It is a critical factor in the lack of trust that pervades today’s political culture.

This distrust was readily apparent in November 2008 when the Immigration Policy Roundtable first convened its twenty participants. The Roundtable is a joint undertaking of the Brookings Institution and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. The group’s distinctive feature is that its members came to the table with divergent, often conflicting perspectives on immigration. In fact, the range of political and ideological views represented at the Roundtable is unprecedented in recent immigration policymaking. Continue reading ““Breaking the Immigration Stalemate” report released”

“Fox & Friends” Monday, September 14 6:15 am ET

I’ll be on Fox & Friends (Channel 44 in NYC) around 6:15 a.m. ET tomorrow morning, Monday September 14th, debating the brouhaha over immigration and healthcare reform.

Here’s some background on the issue from the Los Angeles Times, the Immigration Policy Center, and Reuters.

It’s interesting to see that after Medicare tightened its proof-of-citizenship rules in 2005, about half of the states surveyed by the Government Accountability Office reported that people had fallen off of their Medicare rolls. The vast majority of those who lost health care were citizens, who paid a huge price for an effort that netted nine –count ’em, NINE– unauthorized immigrants. Here’s yet another case where efforts targeting illegal immigrants hurt many citizens, doing more harm than good.