By Jennifer Nagorka, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – San Francisco, home to so much social experimentation, is pushing yet another frontier. Some activists there want all non-citizens, legal or illegal, with children in public schools to be able to vote in school elections. They claim it will encourage more parents to be involved in the schools.
I'll be honest. When I think "voting," I think "citizen," as in, voting is something citizens do.
But the more I consider those two words, "voting" and "citizen," the less clear the connection becomes. Voting is a verb. To vote is to act. Citizen is a noun, a legal status. It feels passive. Most of us are U.S. citizens only because we had the good luck to be born here.
Instead, citizenship seems like the word that belongs with voting. Citizenship implies an entire spectrum of rights and duties and attitudes that knit you into the community and country where you reside. Citizenship is something you live, not something you have. People who respect the law, take responsibility for themselves, and participate in community life, are practicing good citizenship. When you think of citizenship that way, allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections seems reasonable.
One argument against extending voting rights has been the fear of non-citizens' conflicted national loyalties. But school boards don't write international treaties and city councils don't dispatch armies to invade other countries. National loyalties don't matter much in local elections.
The experiences of other countries also show non-citizen voting doesn't spark revolution. New Zealand has allowed permanent residents to vote in all elections since 1975. Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands allow foreign residents to vote and campaign for local office after meeting residency requirements. European countries have very different immigration histories than we have, but American officials could study their examples to find models that would work here.
Would non-citizen voting remake local politics? Not in Dallas. According to the 2000 census, one-fifth of all Dallas residents are non-citizens. Some of those are illegal immigrants, who probably shouldn't be eligible for the expanded franchise. So citizens would outnumber resident alien voters by at least four-to-one. An overwhelming majority of citizens would have to stay home for non-citizens' votes to determine a race.
Of course, many citizens do stay home on Election Day. In this year's March primary, only 12.5 percent of registered Texas voters bothered to cast ballots. Only 10 percent of Dallas' registered voters participated in the 2003 mayor's race. When Texas' own George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, just over half of registered Texans turned out. The real threat to our democracy isn't giving some non-citizens the right to vote in some elections, it's current citizens refusing to vote in any election.
San Francisco's measure is both too broad - it would allow illegal immigrants to vote - and too narrow - only people with children in public schools would gain the right to vote. But try as I might, I can't see harm in the general idea of permitting legal residents to vote in local elections. My fear is that the longer non-citizens live here and the more Americanized they become, the more they'll ignore the political process the same way most citizens do.
Jennifer Nagorka is a writer from Dallas.