What Barriers to Citizenship Mean for Voting Rights

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Democracy Docket
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🗳: "America is a country of immigrants, but significant portions of the population are completely barred from voting for their representatives — no matter how long they live here — unless they become citizens."

What Barriers to Citizenship Mean for Voting Rights
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democracydocket.com
12:00 PM · Jul 5, 2021

https://www.democracydocket.com/2021/07/what-barriers-to-citizenship-mean-for-voting-rights/


It’s Fourth of July weekend — a holiday to celebrate our country’s declaration of nationhood and the birth of what would become the United States of America. Central to the founding principles of our nation is the concept of equal, individual rights, including the right to representative government. But, at the time the Declaration of Independence was signed, there was no distinction of “citizenship” that limited those rights. The concept of citizenship as we know it today was not fully formed — and the ways in which citizenship and voting rights interact have gone through significant changes over the last century. As the holiday encourages us to reflect on our freedom, we’re examining how the barriers to becoming a citizen limit who is eligible to vote — and what that means for the democratic process.

The discussion around voting rights and the fight to protect them rests on one foundational truth: In America, (for the most part) only citizens can vote. In a country of immigrants, this is an incredibly important distinction — as of 2020, over 44 million immigrants were living in the U.S., comprising 13.7% of the population. For undocumented immigrants, the path to citizenship can be next to impossible. For documented immigrants and permanent residents, it can be an arduous and incredibly long process — and many simply choose to never attempt it. But for the foreign-born population of the United States, pursuing citizenship spells the difference between being able to vote for their representatives or not — no matter how long they have lived in the country.

As with most things in American life, the history of noncitizen voting rights is a history of state laws, divergent and independent from any federal standard. According to a research paper written by then-American University law professor Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin (D), for the first hundred or so years of our history “alien suffrage figured importantly in America’s nation-building process and in its struggle to define the dimensions and scope of democratic membership.” The United States was figuring out both how to continue to attract new immigrants and how to unify an already hugely diverse population, made up of large numbers of foreign-born immigrants and granting voting rights to new immigrants was an efficient and effective way to increase their sense of belonging and help build a collective American identity. As such, white men, regardless of citizenship status, had the right to vote in over 22 states before World War I.

Raskin credits this expansion of suffrage to a malleable definition of what citizenship was — not as a legal distinction, but as a social concept. “In choosing to confer the rights of political membership on aliens,” Raskin writes, “these states were recognizing meanings of citizenship apart from the notion of mere membership in the nation-state.” Citizens were members of society who were present in the day-to-day life of a state — and extending this definition to include those who joined only recently was important in order to assimilate new immigrants to the cultures and communities of the state. However, the definition of citizen quickly hardened as America entered World War I. Anti-immigrant sentiment and rampant xenophobia led many states to modify their constitutions and exclude noncitizens from suffrage despite expanding ballot access for female citizens across the country. In 1928, the United States held a national election where noncitizens were ineligible to vote at every single level of government. This new standard has more or less remained the same in the decades since.

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