This morning a paper here in Paris reports a survey that has 61% of the French supporting the right to vote by non-citizens. Last night I watched a program with the last hour dedicated to a debate on this topic. A famous filmmaker, the Minister of Higher Education and Research, a philosopher, a comic, a novelist, a demographer, and a 22 year old presidential candidate argued away, usually ganging up on the conservative Minister. Can you imagine Education Secretary Arne Duncan battling it out, unscripted, with Oliver Stone, a philosopher ($5 if you can name an American philosopher), writer Edwidge Danticat and Stephen Colbert? All we get on US TV is lame one-on-one news debates (as if there were only two points of view!).
And now to the point: should non-citizens get the right to vote? The Minister argued that the start of everything political, any action, must be being French, in an eerie top-down bestowal of identity and action. Democracy is supposed to be the rule of the people. Does the government say who the people are, or do the people say who the government is? Who ‘the people’ refers to has totally changed and has been expanding, from Athenian men with military training to all white men to all white adults to all adult citizens (** to the visible exclusion of over 5 million convicted felons). Are non-citizen immigrants the new excluded? We can’t even say they’re second-class citizens.
The world is going to have more and more of these people, people who follow the source of capital to more industrialized countries (see last post) to provide a better life for their families. Should people who move (and can't or don't want to become citizens) lose their right to vote? In the US, we have an estimated 11-12 million undocumented residents and another million permanent residents who cannot vote. The comic in the French television show juxtaposed a citizen who just moved into town with the immigrant that has lived in a town for 10 years, knows all of the townspeople, but can’t vote.
Shouldn’t the immigrant at least be allowed to vote in local elections? Estonia, Ireland, and Spain allow foreigners to vote, and many countries only require that you have lived there for a certain number of years (like Venezuela, Namibia, and Hong Kong). 20 states or territories in the US used to allow foreigners to vote.
If we actually believe in what democracy is and implies, that the government is of the people that reside somewhere, then residents should have the right to vote. People who come from afar to live somewhere weave into the local fabric, into their local supermarket, park, workplace, pharmacy. They sit through long lines in their local post office, send their kids to the local school, and worry about local safety. If being locally involved makes them civically-minded, maybe the US will feel more inclusive and unified. And maybe they will help vote conservatives out of office! Which is why it probably won't pass... 
I am not sure I understand the differentiation between local and national elections, for if you define yourself as civic-minded on a local level, how far away are you from acting as a citizen on a national level, i.e. what is the difference between local and national citizenship? Maybe you would disagree, but if you asked a documented citizen to define what characteristics MOST contribute to their identity as a citizen, wouldn't they first start with their local relationship to their town or village, etc.?
ReplyDeleteFurther, how do you separate the concept of the right to vote, from that of national identity. For example, if given the opportunity, of the 11 million immigrants in the US who do not currently have the right to vote, would they rather receive that right, or retain their citizenship/voting status in their country of origin?
Thanks for inspiring the Saturday morning thought.
P and M
Does political identity begin from the local experiences or from national frameworks? It is an interesting but clearly complicated question.
ReplyDeleteOne thing to point out is that most immigrants haven't gone through the whole schooling/socialization to the nation process here. So kids are theoretically supposed to develop both local and national identities, but immigrants come with different ones.
The point of course is that immigrants should be able to be involved locally. That will then push them later to become more active voters. And that makes us more of a democracy. See this hot-off-the-presses report on that: http://www.demos.org/publication/citizenship-voting-improving-registration-new-americans
Excellent point about We "the people". How many times throughout History have certain groups of "the people" been excluded from being "the people". We do have to make a conscious effort to re-examine just who are "the people". For life is constantly evolving and ones definition of "the people" over time will change. Excellent choice in photos too.
ReplyDelete