Former Mayor Bloomberg: The Pro-Immigrant Case Against New York City’s Noncitizen Voting

Good arguments. I agree, the goal should be full citizenship and voting rights, not partial:

I have always strongly supported immigrant rights and worked to protect immigrants, expand visa opportunities, and provide a pathway to citizenship for those who are here. A decade ago, I co-founded a bipartisan coalition of leaders to push for immigration reform, a group that recently merged with the American Immigration Council. And during my time as mayor, we created a program to help more New Yorkers apply for citizenship, which became a national model.

To me, being pro-immigrant has always meant incentivizing and rewarding citizenship — but some cities, unfortunately, are in danger of making it a less attractive proposition.

Generations of immigrants have sought U.S. citizenship to gain full access to the American dream, including all the rights and responsibilities that go along with it — chief of them, the right (and responsibility) to vote. But this month, the New York City Council voted 33-14 to authorize noncitizen voting. The bill would grant some 800,000 immigrants with green cards or work permits, and who have been living in the city for 30 days, the right to participate in elections for mayor, city council and other offices, as well as in local ballot questions.

The bill is likely to be challenged in court, because it conflicts with the plain language of the state constitution, which repeatedly uses the word “citizen” in its suffrage clause: “Every citizen shall be entitled to vote at every election for all officers elected by the people and upon all questions submitted to the vote of the people provided that such citizen is eighteen years of age or over and shall have been a resident of this state, and of the county, city, or village for thirty days next preceding an election.”

For good measure, the bill also appears to violate state election statutes, which list mandatory qualifications for voters: “No person shall be qualified to register for and vote at any election unless he is a citizen of the United States and is or will be, on the day of such election, eighteen years of age or over and a resident of this state.” This is hardly ambiguous language.

Should the plan somehow survive a legal challenge, there’s also the small matter of putting it in place. Ballots in local elections often include state offices (judgeships, for instance) and statewide referendums that noncitizens wouldn’t be eligible to vote for. Preventing noncitizens from voting on those matters would be extremely difficult under any circumstances. Leaving it to the city’s board of elections, a notoriously incompetent patronage mill, is a recipe for disaster.

Other jurisdictions may not face exactly these legal and logistical obstacles, but the biggest problem with noncitizen voting isn’t a legal or technical obstacle: It’s the way it devalues citizenship.

Source: The Pro-Immigrant Case Against New York City’s Noncitizen Voting