OPINION:
Foreigners, here legally or illegally, are allowed to vote in San Francisco school board elections. You read that right. Foreigners are legally voting in San Francisco school board elections.
Citizenship should mean something. Many foreigners spent years coming to our country and achieving citizenship status. Along with citizenship came responsibilities and the cherished right to vote.
Now, jurisdictions across the country, including New York City, the District of Columbia and San Francisco, are extending the right to vote to foreign nationals and undermining the very notion of what citizenship means.
Even worse, these cities are diminishing the voting strength of Black Americans who spent more than a century fighting to secure the right to vote. From the Civil War and Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Black Americans fought to have the ability to have their voices heard at the ballot box. Now, Black Americans are having to fight again to stop a voting block of foreign nationals from diluting their political strength.
Expanding the right to vote to foreigners not only diminishes the work of Black Americans to have their vote counted but also gives the right to vote to people who have no stake in the future of our country. Part of being a citizen is caring about leaving the country better off for the next generation. Foreigners living in America do not have the same shared interest in that investment.
They can go back to their original home at any moment.
The impact of illegal immigration on Black Americans is real and goes back decades. Noncitizens have been counted in the drawing of legislative lines, giving these noncitizens outsized representation.
For example, a Black Los Angeles City Council member, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, has stated on the record that there is “a concerted effort to dilute the strength of Black voters” and that he “did not expect that level of Black voter suppression in Los Angeles.”
Expanding the electorate to foreign nationals in San Francisco will dilute Black citizen voting power. Black voters make up only 5.2% of San Francisco’s population. The ability of Black citizens to elect candidates of their choice is already limited. The addition of thousands of non-citizen HIspanic voters to San Francisco’s eligible school board electorate could impair the ability to continue to elect a Black representative on the school board.
That is why I am filing an amicus curiae brief to support the striking down of San Francisco’s foreigner voting bill.
In the other jurisdictions that are extending the right to vote to foreign nationals, legal challenges are being mounted to have these laws declared unconstitutional.
In New York City, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am a board member, filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of four Black voters there to have the city’s foreign voting bill declared unconstitutional for violating the 15th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act. In America, you cannot have any election laws that are racially motivated to favor any group.
We must fight these foreign citizen voting laws wherever they are passed.
We cannot let citizenship cease to mean anything. Black Americans have fought too hard for citizenship and the right to vote to see it diminished.
• Ken Blackwell is the Distinguished Fellow for Human Rights and Constitutional Governance at the Family Research Council. He is a member of the board of directors for the Public Interest Legal Foundation and was Ohio secretary of state from 1999 to 2007.
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