It has been a long time coming, but San Francisco officially joined the handful of places that allow illegal immigrants to vote. Though the decision was made in 2016, it wasn’t until Monday, July 16, 2018, that the city began registering non-citizens.
Under the new rule, anyone – U.S. citizen, legal resident, or even illegal alien – over the age of 18 living in the city with children under 19 will be allowed to vote in November’s school board election. “This is no-brainer legislation,” one city supervisor, Hillary Ronen, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Why would we not want our parents invested in the education of their children?”
Solving the Wrong Problems
There’s an undeniable logic to that sentiment: We should want parents to have a say in the fate of their children. However, applying that ideal in this case ignores the much more significant issue of illegal immigration. We don’t need to give illegals the vote. We need a more manageable path to citizenship for those who aren’t afraid to work for their American dream, and we need to send the rest packing.
The issue isn’t that non-citizen parents should have the right to vote in school board elections for the sake of their children; it’s that non-citizen residents shouldn’t be receiving the benefits of tax-funded education for their children if they aren’t putting anything into the pot.
Thank You, Welfare
Right here is about where some might jump in and say, “but many people who are technically here illegally work and pay taxes!” I’m not talking about them; they fall under the first category above, who should have a more accessible path to citizenship. There’s no reason an immigrant who has lived, worked, and paid taxes in the U.S. for years and has a wife and children who are U.S. citizens, should be considered anything other than a U.S. citizen.
Aside from perhaps jury duty and selective service, he’s doing everything else that is ever asked of a natural born citizen. For this fellow, citizenship should merely be a matter of filling out some forms to make it official. This guy, and those like him, aren’t the problem; it’s the freeloaders who come here hoping to be taken care of on the government dole and the criminals who come here looking for new victims who are.
If it weren’t for the one-two punch of the 14th Amendment’s return to the old English system of birthright citizenship and the Progressive Era’s socialist programs, we wouldn’t have near the issue with illegal immigration that exists today. A considerable amount of good came out of the 14th Amendment, but a lot of bad did as well. Before the second of the three Reconstruction Amendments, anyone considered a citizen of their state of residence was automatically a U.S. citizen. As repugnant as the term “anchor babies” may be to some, it’s still an accurate description of a legitimate problem, for which we can thank the unholy union of birthright citizenship and tax-funded welfare.
Wrong Idea, Right Reasons?
As often is the case with the immigrant rights movement, this seems to be a case of “their hearts were in the right place, but where were their brains?”
The Declaration of Independence expressed our Founders’ views on the nature of human rights, and self-governance is one of those. If we believe that all people should be governed by their own consent rather than be ruled by whatever king under whom they happen to be born subjects, then we must also accept that every person should have the right to vote. It does not mean, however, that every person should have the right to vote here. A citizen and legal resident of Guatemala has no more right to come here and enroll their child in a U.S. tax-funded school and vote on the board than I do to rent a flat in Leeds and vote for Members of Parliament.
