Comment: If you pay taxes, shouldn’t you be able to vote?

By Petula Dvorak / The Washington Post

In America, you don’t have to be a citizen to pay taxes, to drive, to work, to buy property, to send your kids to school or to fight for the U.S. in the military.

(As a nice touch, the armed forces often confer posthumous citizenship to warriors after death in combat.)

But these 25 million noncitizens living in the United States cannot vote in most places. Not in federal elections for Congress or the president, not in state elections for governor, not even in local elections for mayor, or on a municipal bond proposal for a road improvement.

Washington, D.C. — the disenfranchised capital of the nation, where residents and U.S. citizens still don’t have a vote in Congress — is trying to change that. At least, on a local level.

“The right to vote is the right to belong in the community you call home,” said D.C. Council member Charles Allen, a Democrat. “Our noncitizen neighbors, many of whom have lived, worked and raised families in the District for decades, deserve to have a stake in their government and determine their own leaders; just as we all do.”

This was actually how our nation of immigrants used to work; mostly.

Let’s start with the beginning, because the “We The People” neck-tattoo crowd that objects so vociferously to noncitizen voting rights likes that so much.

In 1776, the Virginia Bill of Rights said this is who can vote: “all men, having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to, the community.”

It was strategic.

“State lawmakers offered the franchise as an incentive for white, male, Europeans of working age to migrate,” Allen H. Kennedy, a lecturer in public policy at the College of William & Mary, wrote in his paper “Voters in a Foreign Land: Alien Suffrage in the United States, 1704-1926.”

The immigrants came.

And soon, as waves of Germans and Irish refugees settled in America, the WASPs wigged out and a party called the “Know Nothings” (for real) rose to power on a platform of xenophobia and piety in the 1850s.

They called for deporting immigrants and a 21-year naturalization period; along with mandatory Bible reading in schools and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. This coincided with the end of most “alien suffrage,” as noncitizen voting was called, in America by 1850.

But oops, we realized we needed those immigrants after all, to build railroads, cities, to push westward-ho!

And we allowed some noncitizens voting rights again. Thanks to “territorial expansion, demands for cheap labor, urbanization, racism and sexism, alien suffrage expanded in the mid-to-late 19th century, peaking a century after the nation’s founding,” Kennedy wrote.

This was also when we can remember that citizenship wasn’t always the guarantee to voting rights.

While the 14th Amendment gave Black people citizenship, it took the 15th Amendment two years later to try to ensure that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

After World War I inflamed our xenophobia and — gasp — women were given the right to vote in 1918, the white male folks in charge again became nervous. U.S. citizenship was made a voting requirement across the nation by 1926.

Of course, with oppression raging in the Jim Crow South, voting still wasn’t a guarantee for all U.S. citizens. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had to try yet again to get it right.

In 1996, Congress passed a law requiring U.S. citizenship to vote in all federal elections, a law that doesn’t apply to state and local races.

Right now, a handful of municipalities across the country allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, including 11 in Maryland and two in Vermont. San Francisco’s noncitizen voting rights were created, then struck down, then reinstated, all in the past few months. And New York City’s law was struck down this summer by a judge who said it violated the state constitution.

But D.C. was like, “What state constitution?” and gave it a try; a few tries, actually, because it failed in previous years. But this time, the bill passed a first vote before the D.C. Council last week and has one more vote to clear before it becomes law.

It makes more sense in D.C. than in other places, for sure.

We have more than 50,000 noncitizens living in the city, according to the Migration Policy Institute. That includes refugees we’ve absorbed who have become part of the fabric of the District as they wait for citizenship or reside as permanent citizens, or just live. But it also includes thousands of diplomats and educators who may own homes, send their kids to school and otherwise participate in our city as U.S. citizens do for the years they are here. The migrants who’ve been bused here from Texas and Florida can also vote, as long as they’ve lived in D.C. for 30 days.

The only frightening part of this proposal is what it has elicited from detractors claiming Democrats are now seeking out foreign influence in elections to steal them. Funny, coming after supporters of Donald Trump actually did try to steal an election, right?

“This is what Democrats aspire to do in all 50 states if given the chance,” tweeted Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo.

There is no move anywhere to grant noncitizens the right to vote for Congress or the president. It is not some nationwide plot. They are voting on local issues: parks, traffic, wages, housing.

In D.C., we have folks with green cards, with permanent citizen status and visas contributing their taxes to our economy. And unless we come up with some way for their voices to be heard, D.C. is only fulfilling our combative motto: “Taxation Without Representation.”

The objections to this proposal from folks convinced it’s a Democratic plot to steal the presidential election show how little the people born into their right to vote deserve that privilege.

Petula Dvorak is a columnist for The Washington Post’s local team. Follow her on Twitter @petulad.