Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, July 16, 2018

“My fellow citizens” was once a stock phrase from a politician’s speech. Today, the words are practically “racist;” they are certainly not “inclusive.” Nationwide, local communities are giving the vote to noncitizens. Noncitizen voting makes the very concept of “citizenship” essentially worthless — and as civic identity declines, racial and cultural identities become even more salient.

Noncitizen voting is now being debated is Boston, the cradle of the American Revolution. The city that arguably did the most to create a genuinely American identity is now working to unmake it, as the city council debates voting rights in local elections for legal immigrants. The proposal was introduced by Andrea Campbell, the first black Boston Council president, who is trying simply to please her constituents: “Given the demographics of the city and my district in particular, immigration is an important issue.” Ayanna Pressley, who was the first “woman of color” to be elected to the Council, also supports noncitizen voting. She is challenging an incumbent Democrat for a congressional seat and is backed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Clearly, some non-whites in Boston already consider themselves post-American.

There is still considerable opposition to noncitizen voting in Boston, but some localities elsewhere have already introduced it, including several in Maryland. Hyattsville and Mount Rainier recently introduced noncitizen voting, with Councilman Jesse Christopherson of Mount Rainier saying it was “a message of inclusiveness.” Foreigners recently got the vote in school board elections in San Francisco. Chicago also lets noncitizens vote for school-parent advisory boards.

Proponents of noncitizen voting say that restricting the franchise to citizens is relatively new. Professor Ronald Hayduk, author of Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the U.S., writes that “it’s not been inevitable or natural that voting has been tied to citizenship.” Tanvi Misra, whose opposition to immigration law enforcement is clear from her Twitter feed, wrote in CityLab that noncitizen voting was restricted “between 1880 and 1920, when the flow of migrants escaping political instability and famine in Eastern Europe swelled.” “These were poor people with darker skin and different religious beliefs, many spoke unfamiliar languages and concentrated in cities, where they started political movements that threatened the status quo,” she adds. (She probably means anarchism and communism, which were often led by foreigners such as Emma Goldman, Luigi Galleani, Alexander Berkman.)

Miss Misra matter-of-factly notes that the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 “reconfigured the demography of America” (contrary to the explicit promises of the bill’s supporters, such as Ted Kennedy). “The overhaul of these policies opened the door for immigrants — and also for the reintroduction of local noncitizen voting in the coming decades,” she writes.

When America was being filled with those of similar ethnic heritage to that of the founding population, restricting the suffrage was probably thought unnecessary, especially when newcomers clearly wanted to become American. When the population influx was increasingly foreign, Americans rightly understood that allowing newcomers to vote meant a loss of self-determination by the demos, the actual people of the country.

More recent attempts to allow noncitizen voting have sometimes been explicit efforts to empower Third World immigrants, oppose the Trump Administration, and create a permanent leftist coalition built on non-white voters. For example, Boris Santos, a staffer for New York City Council member Antonio Reynoso, called for noncitizen voting in New York City to combat “discriminatory policies towards our immigrant families from the White House” so the city can “serve as a safe haven and guarantor of basic civic and human rights for our noncitizens.” President Trump seems to sense this; he has denounced noneligible voting in federal elections. In response, several progressive commentators deny that noncitizens are voting while simultaneously saying that noncitizens should be voting. This is like simultaneously claiming “white genocide” is a paranoid conspiracy theory, but also a real-world development that should be celebrated.

Joe Matthews at SFGate.com (an online publication of The San Francisco Chronicle) calls President Trump’s allegation of noncitizen voting an “ugly lie,” but says California should turn it into a “beautiful truth.” Daniel Nichanian at Vox says President Trump is “falsely” claiming millions of illegals are voting, but then goes on to explain how Democrats could increase the number of voters: restore the franchise to felons and let noncitizens vote in local elections. Joshua Douglas in the Washington Post says President Trump’s charges are “debunked,” and that investigating voter fraud is a waste of time. He then writes that noncitizen voting is “an important counterweight to the current anti-immigrant sentiment and voter suppression measures sweeping the country.” The piece is called “Noncitizens are Gaining the Right to Vote. Good.”

There is a conservative reaction. A North Dakota Republican state senate candidate is pushing a state constitutional change that would ban noncitizen voting. There is a similar ballot initiative in Montana. Republicans generally tend to be more wary of potential voter fraud; a poll released in August 2017 found half of Republicans polled would support delaying the 2020 election if President Trump said it was necessary to prevent voter fraud.

Enfranchising foreigners means disfranchising citizens, since each noncitizen cancels out one citizen. Voting, as Robert Heinlein accurately noted in Starship Troopers, is a use of force. The voter uses his small amount of power to give the people he wants control of the state. This control will be used to impose policies backed by the state’s monopoly on violence. Creating a potential new majority of foreign voters to rule over a population of natives is conquest.

This is why progressives favor it. Noncitizen voting disempowers citizens; it is a way to “elect a new people.” The progressives’ willingness to use foreigners against their fellow citizens is the electoral equivalent of hiring Hessian mercenaries. A white progressive minority reinforced by non-white and noncitizen voters can rule over a white citizen majority. Conservative white Americans may be the last people who still believe in the American nation-state.

Ultimately, as the late Lee Kwon Yew observed, “In multicultural democracies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests; you vote in accordance with race and religion.” If noncitizens can vote, it means the nation and the state have been decisively separated. White Americans still think of themselves as Americans, not as members of a racial community. However, civic nationalism is dead if citizens’ destinies are determined by foreigners who lack not just the bonds of kinship and culture, but even the same passport. If current trends continue, American identity may die, but white identity will grow.