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Each election cycle, millions of Americans head to the polls, motivated by a belief that their vote can yield change. We’re reminded of this everywhere we turn: Celebrities take to social media to encourage participation; political campaigns blast us with texts reminding us to vote; our timelines are filled with “I Voted” stickers. Over and over, we’re told that voting is our power — ours to use or neglect — for better or worse.
But for the nearly 25 million noncitizens living in the United States, election season is just another opportunity to be excluded from the democratic process. For more than a quarter century, noncitizens have been officially barred from voting in federal elections, and no state has allowed their vote since Arkansas banned noncitizen suffrage in 1926. Our country, a so-called nation of immigrants, has worked exceptionally hard to silence the voices of those “yearning to breathe free.”
As faith in our democracy dwindles and federal voting rights legislation remains stalled in Washington, there has never been a better moment to make good on the nation’s democratic ideals and expand suffrage to all noncitizens — documented and undocumented — living in the United States.
To start, the Constitution does not explicitly deny noncitizens the right to vote. Nor is there evidence that the founders intended suffrage to be exclusive to citizens (they were much more concerned with excluding people from the democratic process based on race, gender, and class). From the earliest days of the republic, noncitizens were enfranchised at various times in nearly 40 states, holding equal say with citizens on how and by whom their communities were represented, and they helped elect presidents, governors, and congresspeople.
It made sense then, and it still does now.
Noncitizens contribute to their communities in nearly all the ways that citizens do: They pay taxes (undocumented residents alone pay more than $11 billion a year), operate businesses, own and rent property, attend public schools and universities. Their economic impact is tremendous and drives essential industries such as food processing and distribution, agriculture, and construction. I wonder what the early Americans who railed against “taxation without representation” would have to say about the millions of tax-paying immigrants in the United States who have no say about how and by whom they are governed.
The financial impact is clear, but that should not dictate suffrage. The right to vote shouldn't be based on what one contributes to the economy. Nor should it be a reward for completing the long and expensive process of becoming a citizen. It is a right based on a simple democratic value invoked by civil rights activists more than half a century ago: one person, one vote.
Over the years, nativist fearmongering during times of war led to the gradual stripping away of voting rights from noncitizens. In the lead up to the Civil War, Southern states launched an attack on noncitizen suffrage, which was still common across the country at that time, because immigrants tended to support antislavery legislation. Years later, the nationalist movement caught fire after World War I, as the country began to more narrowly define what it means to be “American.” Noncitizen suffrage was all but dead by the early 1900s.
In the century since, no state has extended suffrage to noncitizens. The result has been a generation of American immigrants who have been shut out of the democratic process, unable to select their representatives or vote on laws that impact their families and neighbors.
As a teenager in Houston, Texas, Maria Treviño Rodriguez began organizing to advocate for her own undocumented family and their neighbors. “I began working on political campaigns to take back a little bit of that voting power,” Treviño Rodriguez tells Teen Vogue. “What I tell myself is that although I cannot vote, I can persuade and get other people out to vote in my best interest.”
The first campaign she worked on was a Texas governor’s race, which she was drawn to because gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis favored giving state-issued driver’s licenses and ID cards to undocumented Texans. For Treviño Rodriguez, Davis’s pledge was personal. It meant her family could avoid being arrested, and potentially deported, if they encountered police. After spending weeks working with the campaign in the lead up to the election, Treviño Rodriguez had to wait outside while her fellow staffers went inside the polling location to vote on Election Day. She was the only one who couldn’t vote.
Later that night, Davis lost the governor’s race. Treviño Rodriguez’s hopes for state-issued documentation for her family were dashed.
“My relationship with our democracy is complicated,” Treviño Rodriguez says. “My family has been paying taxes ever since they've been here, pretty much, and none of what we pay for has ever trickled down onto us. We've never benefited from any of the social programs that we pay into. And we've never been able to choose who represents us.”
As we’ve been reminded since Democrats were elected to majorities in both the House and Senate, voting does not solve all our problems. But suffrage would allow noncitizens the chance to reduce institutional harms in their communities that they currently have few means to address. It would also afford their communities the political power to begin changing systemic ills brought on by policing and the immigration system, institutions which disproportionately target undocumented immigrants of color. As Treviño Rodriguez discovered the night Davis lost, allyship alone isn’t enough to make a difference — one needs political power too.
But there is hope. Recently, New York City became the largest of 15 cities that have granted suffrage in local elections to legal permanent residents, DACA recipients like Maria, and those with work visas. When the law takes effect in January 2023, more than 800,000 New Yorkers will have the opportunity to participate in the electoral process for the first time. With similar bills being considered in Washington, DC, and Massachusetts, we’ll likely see this movement grow more in the coming years.
At the same time, the recent wave of voter suppression legislation is a stark reminder that for many Americans “one person, one vote” has always been a hollow promise. More than 50 years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, communities of color continue to fight institutional voter suppression every single day.
Could a country that doesn’t treat its own citizens' right to vote as sacred treat its noncitizens’ voting rights as sacred one day?
Our democracy relies on us preserving both.
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