While it may sound surprising that the First Amendment could protect electoral advocacy by noncitizens, including political contributions and expenditures, the argument is grounded in precedent. The Supreme Court has held for over 35 years that the First Amendment protects the right to make political contributions and expenditures. Moreover, courts have long held that noncitizens who lawfully reside within the United States are entitled to the full protection of the First Amendment. The plaintiffs’ argument in Bluman simply combines these two strands of precedent.

Noncitizens who have permanent residency are allowed to make contributions and political expenditures. Allowing lawful temporary residents to do the same, on the same terms as United States citizens, would also reflect the general rule that the First Amendment’s protections do not vary based on the identity of the speaker. That belief was at the center of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. F.E.C., which held that Congress lacked the power to prohibit corporations from spending money to influence federal elections.

The reasoning of Citizens United applies with even greater force to noncitizens who lawfully reside in the United States. Whatever one thinks of that ruling, the most common criticism against it — that corporations are not people — certainly doesn’t apply to the millions of noncitizens affected by the law, as cited by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights in its amicus brief. Even critics of the decision, like the election-law scholar Richard L. Hasen, have argued that the only way to rule against the plaintiffs in Bluman is to ignore that decision.

Which is precisely what the three-judge panel did last August. Rather than engaging with Citizens United or the rest of the Supreme Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence, the panel turned to a different line of cases holding that noncitizens could be prohibited from holding elective office or serving as police officers or public school teachers. Based on these cases, the panel concluded that the ban on noncitizen campaign activity was a permissible means of preventing “foreign influence” over elections in the United States.

The cases upon which the panel relied establish that, with regard to holding actual positions of government authority, noncitizens can be treated differently from citizens. But those cases have no direct bearing on the First Amendment questions presented in Bluman. Nobody, foreign or otherwise, has a First Amendment right to hold elective office.