The Movement to Give the Vote to Non-Citizens Begins

With the newest border crisis focusing on the influx of immigrants from Central America, many of them children, the political punching bag that is immigration reform is again leading the news. Democrats, incongruously, claim that the obvious ineffectiveness of our border is proof that we need to reform immigration laws to allow current foreigners who are here illegally to stay. How this stops the flow rather than increase it is not explained. Many Republicans have taken up the cause of amnesty by raising the curious proposition that many of those currently here illegally may eventually join the ranks of the Republican Party. The pipe dream is based upon several assumptions, including the expectation that it will take time for the newly legalized immigrants to become citizens, during which time they will come to appreciate the freedoms offered by the capitalistic system and adopt the traditional American values of self-reliance, free markets, and family tradition.

This childish myth will soon be crushed by the realities being built, step by step, by progressive activists all over the country. Their tactics are reminiscent of the old joke of how you eat an elephant: one piece at a time. The New York state legislature is currently reviewing a bill to give the right to vote to nearly three million non-citizens. The New York City Council is simultaneously reviewing similar legislation to allow non-citizens the right to vote in local elections. There is a good chance that the legislation will pass. This is, no surprisingly, supported by progressive New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Non-citizens can already vote in municipal elections in several cities in New York, Maryland, and Illinois. San Francisco has been pushing this idea for years, and it is only a matter of time until it passes there. This is part of the small-ball game the adherents of the tactics of Saul Alinsky have adopted to penetrate the political infrastructure from the bottom up as well as from the top down. It is much easier to push radical agendas on a small-town level than to start in Washington, D.C., where a lot of money and influence are required to grease the right palms. By starting on a local level in every city in the country, progressives can infiltrate city councils and school boards, get judicial appointments, and eventually reach City Hall. This is how ideas like sanctuary cities, Common Core, nuclear-free zones, and climate change alarmism take root and eventually spread out to a state level. They have been using this tactic for several decades, and with this president and a country more divided than ever, they are ready to take their show on the national road. Taking another look at the current immigration landscape, the visceral hunger of the Democrat Party to legalize the status of immigrants who entered the country illegal becomes understandable. When those immigrants are given the vote, they are not going to vote Republican. By introducing millions of unskilled, non-English-speaking people with dependent children into the country, and then giving them voting rights immediately, the Democrats have sealed in a majority voting bloc for decades to come. These will be millions of voters who are totally dependent upon government and their political arm, the Democratic Party. In Wisconsin, the federal government is already suing a company for firing employees who cannot speak English. The government says that it is discrimination to not employ someone just because he cannot communicate with customers or co-workers. The irrelevance of English is important for the progressives to emphasize, since it muzzles assimilation, enhances the Balkanization of the country, and, therefore, strengthens identity politics, at which liberals excel. It is ironic that on the Fourth of July we have a major political party working overtime to trivialize citizenship in the country launched on this date 238 years ago. Victor Keith writes from Burbank, California and can be contacted at victorakeith.com.