On December 9, 2021, the New York City Council met to decide if noncitizens should be allowed to vote in all municipal elections. Versions of Local Law 11 had been floating around for decades. But it had never gained serious momentum for unsurprising reasons.

The bill represented a potentially drastic change in the electorate — about 1 in 11 New Yorkers, some 800,000 people, are documented noncitizens. In most of the country, this would disqualify them from voting for any office. There have been exceptions. In New York City, noncitizens had been allowed to vote in local school-board elections until 2002. But for many people there was a gut-level aversion to the bill. Isn’t the whole point of citizenship that it determines who gets to vote?

Ydanis Rodriguez, Local Law 11’s sponsor on the City Council, had been arguing that barring noncitizens was not so obvious. Rodriguez had emigrated to New York from the Dominican Republic in 1983. He spent his first 17 years in the U.S. with a green card that let him drive a taxi and teach social studies in a Washington Heights high school. He paid taxes, he was part of the community, but he could not vote. Was citizenship — which Rodriguez gained in 2000, nine years before he was elected to the City Council — really what turned him from someone who was not qualified to help choose the mayor into someone who was?

Noncitizen voting is “about giving people who pay taxes dignity and respect,” Rodriguez says. And he had witnessed its benefits firsthand. In 1986, a voting drive in his neighborhood registered 10,000 parents, most of whom were Dominican immigrants, ahead of an upcoming school-board election. The impact was immediate. New voters helped elect as school-board president Guillermo Linares, the first Dominican to ever hold public office in the U.S. Neighborhood schools that for years had been neglected saw an influx of investment, including more funding and after-school programs. The difference was not that the government suddenly cared more about immigrants. The difference was that noncitizens — who in all other meaningful respects were everyday New Yorkers — had the power to defend their own interests.

The meeting to vote on Local Law 11 happened during the window between Donald Trump’s ouster and Joe Biden’s public implosion. It was a time when national trends were pulling Democrats to the left on immigration. COVID was in retreat, leaving a feeling of gratitude for immigrant frontline workers. Trump was not reelected amid popular outrage at his immigration crackdown. “The idea of pushing something like this during the reign of terror of Trump is no longer with us,” said Councilmember Carlos Menchaca, urging the bill forward. After several contentious hours, Local Law 11 was approved.

“There was a feeling that we were winning a lot,” says Emily Tucker, who teaches law at Georgetown University and worked on noncitizen voting legislation in New York as a staff attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy. “I think we totally misunderstood where we were.”

Now Trump is back in office, partly due to backlash to Biden’s ineffectual border policies, and has brought renewed rancor to his anti-immigrant agenda. He is using his bully pulpit to demonize vast swathes of Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Black Caribbean. He deployed masked agents to snatch record numbers of immigrants off the streets and spirit them to jails in Florida swamps and Salvadoran jungles. Under Trump, it has also become “harder and harder over time to pursue citizenship legally,” says Brianne Nadeau, a Washington, D.C., councilmember who sponsored a noncitizen voting bill in 2021. “It’s not even a question of: Why can’t these people just go through the process and become citizens?”

The result is a profound contradiction. Noncitizens — in spite of Trump’s efforts — remain an ineradicable part of this country. We depend on their labor and tax dollars to function but, on a policy level at least, keep them trapped in legal limbo. They are unable to consent to how they are governed and are prevented from becoming full citizens so they can have a say. They are simultaneously more policed and more excluded from the democratic processes that control how they are treated by the state.

Meanwhile, the specter of the noncitizen voter has become the driving fear on the right. In his second term, Trump has pushed noncitizen voting to the center of the GOP agenda with the SAVE America Act, a purportedly anti-fraud election bill that requires would-be voters to show proof of citizenship. The president has called this legislation “one of the most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress.” And, though it has not passed, his administration is trying to enforce it. Homeland Security........

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