One of the favorite lines used by the get-tough-on-immigrants crowd is to claim that people who don't share their views "confuse legal with illegal immigration." This is the wall-builders' way of arguing that when it comes to legal immigration, they love the Statue of Liberty and all it stand for, their own ancestors were immigrants -legal ones, mind you-- and, in fact, some of their best friends are legal immigrants.
Now it seems that confusing legal and illegal immigrants with immigrants who are naturalized U.S. citizens is a deliberate part of the campaign strategy of some folks who sent a letter to 14,000 Orange County Hispanics claiming that they could be arrested and deported if they vote in November's election. Presumably, the strategy was aimed at discouraging naturalized citizens and U.S.-born Hispanic voters from turning out at the polls to re-elect U.S. Representative Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat.
"You are advised that if your residence in this country is illegal or you are an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime that could result in jail time," said the letter, which was written in Spanish.
The letter is disturbing for so many reasons. It implies that anyone with a Hispanic surname is suspected of being here illegally and intent on voting fraudulently -- a confusion of legal with illegal if I've ever heard one. It bends the truth in its implicit assertion that even naturalized citizens could be arrested for voting. It smacks of racketeering in its clear intent to intimidate potential voters. It's hard not to read the letter as a response to last spring's "Today We March, Tomorrow We Vote," proclamations.
Unfortunately, it also reflects an ugly trend that threatens to disenfranchise many native-born U.S. citizens as well as naturalized ones. Arizona's infamous Proposition 200, passed in 2004, requires voters to prove their citizenship Despite the state elections chief stating that there had been precisely zero reports of illegal immigrants attempting to vote The Oregon House of Representatives passed a copy-cat proposal this year, though it did not become law. Colorado legislators discussed the issue in a special legislative session on illegal immigration. Georgia passed a similar law, which was then overturned in early October as a form of poll tax.
In September, the U.S. House of Representatives joined in the fray with a bill, HR 4844 that would, require government-issued photo identification. The Senate did not immediately follow suit.
Law-abiding American citizens are naturally horrified at the prospect of fraud by foreigners who might try to influence U.S. policy, elect a president who would throw the borders wide open, and not only force bilingual education on the schools but go even farther to make Spanish the official language.
But anyone who thinks of such a scenario as a real possibility would be getting upset over a problem that does not exist and is not likely to. Election officials are hard-pressed to come up with any evidence that widespread voting by non-citizens is a serious problem.
In one of the hearings on immigration that took place across the country last summer -one that stood out from the others in that both sides of the debate were represented instead of just the hard-line view--Maricopa (Arizona) County District Attorney Andrew Thomas testified that a total of four non-citizens actually voted in 2005. Under the provisions of Proposition 200, all of ten non-citizens were charged with registering to vote. That's out of a total of roughly 1.5 million registered voters in the county. Some big problem, right?
By contrast, more than 10,000 citizens in Maricopa County were rejected as voters in the 2005 election because they could not prove their citizenship -in some cases because married names did not match birth certificates. Though some eventually were able to clear up the problem, about 1,000 citizens were prevented from casting ballots in the 2005 election despite being registered voters. That does not count the impossible-to-know number of people who simply did not register or vote for fear of being challenged.
The Arizona case illustrates dramatically how U.S. citizens are suffering collateral damage from policies intended to punish undocumented immigrants instead of fixing our laws so that the hard-working, law-abiding people we need can come in through the front door and we can focus on catching the real law-breakers. But it also is a warning of the way that bad ideas can come cloaked in seemingly reasonable guise. After all, who isn't in favor of the integrity of the ballot box? (The answer to that question may be the very people who are trying to paint non-citizens as the biggest threat to.)
The illegal-immigrants-voting straw man is far from the biggest problem at the ballot box. Blaming illegal immigrants, in fact, is a cynical ploy that ultimately would make it easier to keep Americans away from the polls -people like those in, say, Ohio, or in neighborhoods across the country where poor public transportation is as much an obstacle to getting an ID as it is to getting out the vote.
When will Americans learn that whenever the politicians holler loudest about illegal immigrant invasions, it's because they're trying to distract us from their own corruption and failure to do right by their constituents? Undocumented immigrants are perhaps 4 percent of the population. If every single immigrant here illegally were to disappear tomorrow, would every American really get a decent education and health care? Would our roads and public transport systems no longer be inadequate and ill-maintained? Would our election system be without fraud?
The saddest part of such immigration scare tactics is the message we're sending to those who have arrived recently and are learning first-hand what America is about. That brings me to the final thing that is so disturbing about the letter sent out to discourage people with Hispanic surnames from voting: the letter campaign has been linked to a Vietnamese immigrant, Tan Nguyen, running for office as a Republican challenger. Though he denies direct knowledge of the letter (and six other Vietnamese-American political candidates in Orange County quickly denounced it), the fact that such a letter could go out from his campaign is a sad commentary on just how quickly some immigrants are absorbing the messages being sent by a wrong-headed but vocal minority about what America means: that it's okay to judge people and harass them based on their race, skin color, or nationality. Immigrants may want to take a cue from those who complain (though mistakenly) about "confusing legal and illegal immigrants," and stand up to make sure that nobody confuses "real" Americans with the kind --whether naturalized or native born-- who would send such a letter.