We’ve gotten a number of well-reasoned and thoughtful responses to my post yesterday on non-citizen voting and the concept of citizenship itself. First from TPM Readers AK and JC, US expats living in Toronto …
As long time readers, my partner and I were surprised and disappointed in your response to the New York proposal. It seems to be based more on a gut response than any evidence around civic engagement (one of us is currently working on a PhD centering on civic engagement and community development, so this isn’t exactly uninformed opinion). We are US citizens living in Toronto for the next several years (see aforementioned PhD program), so perhaps we offer a useful perspective on a similar situation. Not to conflate the two cities, but there are enough similarities that comparisons are in several ways apt. Sitting here on the other side of the border, unable to contribute to the governance of a city we’ll call our home for enough years that we’ll be materially affected by the decisions of local policymakers, it’s a little easier to see some of the merits to New York’s proposal.
Foreign born people make up 50 percent of Toronto’s population, vs 36 percent in New York. The vast majority of these in both cities are people of color, and skew to the lower end of the economic spectrum. While many in both cases are citizens, the metric is a useful indication of the diversity of two cities that serve as primary landing pads in their respective countries. For many of these residents, citizenship may never be an option; numerous structural barriers, from national policy like rules excluding elegibility for some refugees, to the simple cost of application, will forever preclude a portion of immigrants from attaining citizen status. Even for those who can become citizens, the process takes years, during which those residents can’t vote on matters that affect them. This leaves us with two cities in which a portion of the population, and one that again skews to some already systematically disadvantaged groups, is denied the franchise.
In Toronto, there was a similar proposal, though it was not met with nearly the same support as the New York policy in question seems to enjoy so far. Its purpose, I think, was similar – to include in civic life the large numbers of at least temporarily and perhaps perpetually non-citizen residents of the city in local decision-making. Excluding these people doesn’t serve democracy – the lives of these non-citizen residents in many ways are more at the mercy of the governments they cannot have a hand in electing than their average citizen counterparts. Reduced economic power means you and your kids are more subject to the decisions of your local school board, feel more accutely the decisions to cut back on city services your local taxes pay for, and generally have fewer options to avoid the effects of policy made by a government that is less accountable to you. Take, for example, someone who immigrates to New York when their child is just old enough to start school. In the ten years it will take them to become a citizen, their child will complete most of their schooling in a system whose elected leadership is unaccountable to that parent or the many others like them. The city may engage in policies like stop and frisk that disproportionately affect young people like their child, all without their ability to vote for leaders opposed to such policy. And the city may, like Toronto has, vote to cut programs that support the needs of immigrant families, without the say of those very immigrants. In this proposal, New York is doing more to stay true to our founding value in democracy and the inclusion of the governed than our national immigration policy is of late.
Furthermore, alienating these residents from the process of government, systemically disincluding them, is not likely to improve the growth of strong communities or a strong civic culture. The ties you allude to, bringing together people from across economic and social strata, aren’t formed by nominal allegiances or legal status, but by the time and effort spent together doing the real work of building community. (Judging from recent Republican approaches to spending on critical anti-inequality programs like head start and medicaid, US nationalism does little to build real empathy across economic and social division.) There is much more evidence to suggest that active and ongoing engagement in one’s community are what builds that social solidarity you write of. Preventing people from engaging in meaningful decisionmaking about the policy affecting their day to day lives just serves to keep people from participating more broadly. And these exclusions may have an effect on civic participation even for those who can become citizens; research on voting behavior indicates voting frequency is tied to feelings of voter efficacy, and that people vote less often if they feel that people like them aren’t listened to in government. If New York wants to build a stronger civic culture and more engaged citizens, they’re on the right track with this policy, not the wrong one.
We’d agree with your admonition to keep the doors open for citizenship, but they just aren’t that way now, and from the look of things, won’t be getting considerably more so at a national level any time soon. That’s why we applaud New York’s efforts to solve the problems this often-closed-door approach causes at the local level through local policy, and hope you’ll reconsider your position.
