The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“Washingtonians love to complain about taxation without representation. But for me and my fellow noncitizens, it is a fact of political life that we submit to unquestioningly year after year, primary after primary, presidential election after presidential election. Nearly 15 million people living legally in the United States, most of whom contribute as much as any natural-born American to this country’s civic, cultural and economic life, don’t have a say in matters of politics and policy because we — resident foreign nationals, or ‘aliens’ as we are sometimes called — cannot vote.
“Considering the Supreme Court’s recent decision undermining voting rights, and Republicans’ efforts to suppress, redistrict and manipulate their way to electoral security, it’s time for Democrats to radically expand the electorate. Proposing federal legislation to give millions of young people and essential workers a clear road to citizenship is a good start. But there’s another measure that lawmakers both in Washington and state capitals should put in place: lifting voting restrictions on legal residents who aren’t citizens — people with green cards, people here on work visas, and those who arrived in the country as children and are still waiting for permanent papers.
“Expanding the franchise in this way would give American democracy new life, restore immigrants’ trust in government and send a powerful message of inclusion to the rest of the world.
“It’s easy to assume that restricting the franchise to citizens is an age-old, nonnegotiable fact. But it’s actually a relatively recent convention and a political choice.. . . .The strongest case for noncitizen voting today is representation: The more voters show up to the polls, the more accurately elections reflect people’s desires….” — There Is No Good Reason You Should Have to Be a Citizen to Vote, Atossa Arahamian, The New York Times, 7/2/21 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: To assess the claim of this article, one might ask the following questions. Should Methodists be allowed to vote in Baptist elections? Should opponents of environmentalism be able to vote in Sierra Club elections? The answer obviously is no. A organization typically limits membership and voting rights to people who support the goals of the groupThe same applies to nations. The purpose of a nation is its national interest, and the people who uphold that interest, in democracies, are voting citizens.
Arahamian tells us to give the vote to resident citizens of other countries, to people who declare no loyalty to our national interest. They are also people who may not speak our language well, or know much about our history, politics, or values. Most plainly, it is not in our national interest to let them vote. We are under no obligation to “reflect their desires.” If some of these legal resident aliens wish to become citizens and voters, they can go through the process of applying and qualifying for citizenship. By doing so, they will affirm their allegiance to our society and their fitness to join it.
This writer cites past times when certain localities in the U.S. allowed noncitizen voting, but this is no guide for the present, as we face growing challenges to the worth and value of our citizenship, thanks to rise of “globalist” thinking among our elites. In any case, the weight of settled law is on the side limiting the vote to citizens. With respect to federal law, the 14th Amendment clearly links citizenship and voting.
To any loyal American the notion of giving the vote to all foreigners in the U.S. is patently absurd. One likely reason Arahamian advocates it is that she is not an American. According to Wikipedia, she was born in Switzerland and grew up in Canada. A citizen of Switzerland, Canada, and Iran, she is the author of The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen. Her lack of allegiance to the U.S., however, does keep her from meddling in U.S. politics with her recommendation that the Democrats expand the electorate (meaning their electorate) with noncitizen voting.
Why does the Times give a forum to such a person and her extremist views? Sadly, it appears that Times, as well as much of the corporate media, share her globalist and un-American outlook. But for the Times it wasn’t always so. In an editorial in 2004 it endorsed the statement of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg that that voting “is ‘the essence of citizenship’” and that “Extending the most important benefits of citizenship to those who still hold their first allegiance to another country seems counterproductive.” Such common sense is pretty uncommon at the Times today.