Alien Suffrage

• Author: Jamin Raskin
• Pages: 68-69

Page 68

CITIZENSHIP and voting are so closely linked in the modern political imagination that many Americans are shocked to learn that the United States once had a rich tradition of noncitizens' participating in local, state, and national elections. The practice first appeared in the colonies, which only required voters to be propertied white male residents?not British citizens. After the AMERICAN REVOLUTION and ratification of the Constitution, many of the states, like the Commonwealth of Virginia, continued to enfranchise propertied white male aliens in all state and therefore?under Article I of the Constitution?all federal elections. Congress also gave ALIENS the right to vote for representatives to their territorial legislatures when it reenacted the NORTHWEST ORDINANCE in 1789 and authorized the election of representatives to state constitutional conventions in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. Although the War of 1812 upset alien suffrage in numerous states, the policy revived as the nation pressed westward in the 1840s and states such as Minnesota, Washington, Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, Dakota, Wyoming, and Oklahoma tried hard to attract new residents by granting "declarant aliens"?those who had declared their intention to become citizens?VOTING RIGHTS and the symbolic standing they confer.

The CIVIL WAR polarized public sentiment around alien suffrage. Southerners attacked the political influence of immigrants, who generally arrived hostile to the institution of SLAVERY, while Northern states and politicians celebrated alien suffrage as a way to integrate newcomers to democratic life. The Union also drafted declarant aliens into the army on the theory that they were effectively state citizens, even if not yet citizens of the nation. Meanwhile, delegates to the Confederate constitutional convention in Montgomery, Alabama, wrote a blanket ban on alien voting into the CONFEDERATE CONSTITUTION. In the wake of Northern victory in the Civil War, thirteen new states adopted declarant alien suffrage, including Southern states now subject to RECONSTRUCTION governments eager to attract new blood and honor the valor of the many alien soldiers who fought for the Union. By the close of the nineteenth century, about half of the states and territories had experimented with giving aliens the right to vote alongside citizens.

The rise of anti-immigrant feeling at the turn of the twentieth century altered the political terrain...