Woke Against Democracy
By Joe Guzzardi
On July 28, The New York Times published an op-ed titled, “There Is No Good Reason You Should Have to Be a Citizen to Vote.” The Times described Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s opinion piece as “part of a series [‘Snap Out of It, America’] exploring bold ideas to revitalize and renew the American experiment.”
Bold, revitalize and renew are the misleading words that the Times chose instead of the more accurate: radical, audacious and subversive. The American experiment that the Times boasts proudly of championing is overthrowing America’s existing, time-honored voting system which legally excludes voting rights for noncitizens.
Abrahamian, the Canadian born author of “The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen,” and who holds Swiss and Iranian citizenship, proposes, among other extreme concepts, that voting rights be given to foreign nationals residing in the U.S. on temporary work visas, and Green Card holders. Those immigrant categories would include non-English speakers and those who have briefly lived in the U.S. Ironically, Abrahamian’s proposal would also extend to illegal aliens who have knowingly and willingly broken U.S. law, and presumably would also be granted to the estimated 2 million aliens who will surge the Southwest Border this year.
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, however, expressly barred noncitizens from voting. But the 1996 act has been steadily chipped away at and criminally disregarded. A San Francisco 2016 referendum joined a few other municipalities to give illegal immigrants voting privileges in local school board elections. The supporting argument was that about one-third of San Francisco school district pupils had foreign-born parents. Whether those parents were legally present was not part of the debate. Advocates also speciously argued that participating in the electoral process gives unlawfully present immigrants a greater sense of community involvement.
Illegal immigrants have, fraudulently and feloniously, registered to vote and have cast possibly deciding ballots in federal elections. In its essay, “Aliens and Voter Fraud,” the Center for Immigration Studies wrote that when Old Dominion University (ODU) and George Mason University (GMU) researchers analyzed noncitizen participation rates from the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies’ 2008 and 2010 data, they estimated that roughly 620,000 noncitizens were registered to vote prior to the 2008 election.
The researchers then turned their attention to the 2008 North Carolina presidential results as well as to the Minnesota senate race. By comparing the noncitizen turnout to the vote margin needed to win the elections, ODU and GMU analysts concluded that noncitizen voting likely won the elections for the Democratic Party candidates in both instances. In the North Carolina election, the ODU and GMU authors wrote that “it is likely … that John McCain would have won North Carolina were it not for the votes for Obama cast by noncitizens.”
The Minnesota senate election was one of the most crucial congressional races in the 2008 election cycle, given that it ensured a 60-vote filibuster-proof Democratic majority. Notably, after a mandatory recount, and eight months after Election Day, 312 votes determined the Senate winner. Highlighting the paper-thin margin in which Democrat candidate Al Franken defeated Republican incumbent Norm Coleman, the authors wrote that “participation by more than 0.65 percent of noncitizens in MN is sufficient to account for the entirety of Franken’s margin. Our best guess is that nearly ten times as many [noncitizens] voted.”
A University of Alabama study, “Immigration Status, Immigrant Family Ties, and Support for the Democratic Party,” concluded that immigrants, their children and theirgrandchildren are all more likely than Americans without close immigrant relatives to support the Democratic Party. If the entire illegal alien and temporary resident population were granted voting rights, Abrahamian’s goal, years if not decades will pass before the GOP won enough federal elections to make a difference.
To all but the woke, a group that includes the Times, globalist Abrahamian and far too many Washington, D.C., elites, sovereign American and inalienable voting rights that go with citizenship are treasured values to defend, fight and die for.
Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
Woke Against Democracy
Woke Against Democracy
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