Immigrants and Elections: Does a Lack of Citizenship Rights Translate into a Lack of Voice?
As part of our Election 2012 series, James A. McCann evaluates the political voice of non-citizens during an election season. A political scientist at Purdue University, McCann is also a former RSF Visiting Scholar.
At present, some forty million residents of the United States – or about one-eighth of the total population – are foreign-born. The number of immigrants in the U.S. is now at an all-time high. To find a period in history when as large a proportion of the mass public was foreign-born, we must look back a century to the first great wave of migrant settlement. Immigrants today vary widely with respect to country of origin, language use, cultural practice, family structure, and job skills. There is also considerable variation in formal civic and migration status. According to the most recent Census estimates, 37 percent of the foreign-born are naturalized American citizens, 35 percent are permanent or temporary legal residents, and 28 percent are unauthorized to reside in the United States.
In this campaign season, much concern has been expressed about these latter two groups, and the possibility that immigrants without voting rights may gain access to the ballot box. Over a dozen states have sought to purge alleged non-citizens from electoral registration lists, and nine require voters to prove their identity by showing a government-issued document with a photograph at polling stations. To date, however, exceedingly little evidence of unlawful voting has emerged. Except in scattered municipalities around the country where non-citizens can vote in local elections, immigrants who have not completed naturalization cannot, and do not, cast ballots.
But does the lack of citizenship rights necessarily translate into a lack of voice during major national election campaigns? Large-scale telephone surveys of Mexican immigrants that I conducted with Stacey Connaughton (Purdue University) and Katsuo Nishikawa (Trinity University) during the 2008 campaigns with the support of the Russell Sage Foundation demonstrate that the foreign-born are far from disengaged from electoral politics. This holds true even for immigrants without voting rights. Below I point to three features of political engagement that we discovered among the foreign-born.
• First, the vast majority of Mexican immigrants on our sample – over 80 percent (N=1,023) – expressed at least some interest in U.S. politics. Non-citizens were generally as attentive to politics as naturalized Mexicans. There was practically no variation in attention levels between our two sampling sites, San Antonio, Texas, a traditional destination for Latino immigrants, and north-central Indiana, which has only very recently become an attractive area for settlement. There were also only modest differences between citizens and non-citizens in knowledge about American politics, measured by whether an immigrant knew the political party of George W. Bush and whether the Democrats or Republicans controlled the U.S. House of Representatives. Such findings indicate that a lack of citizenship rights does not impede political learning.
• Nor are non-citizens strangers to political movements and electoral campaigns. When asked in 2008 whether they had participated over the last year in marches, protests, or public rallies to support immigrant rights in the U.S., approximately one out of six Mexicans in our sample reported being active in one of these ways, regardless of whether or not they were naturalized citizens. Moreover, six out of ten non-citizens told us that they had spoken with friends and family about the candidates running for office that year, nearly as many encouraged friends with voting rights to turn out for the 2008 elections, and 12 percent stated that they had worn a campaign button, placed a sign for a candidate in their window, put a campaign bumper sticker on their car, or distributed literature about the elections in parks and other public places. The proportion of non-citizens engaged in these more labor-intensive campaign activities was actually higher than that for Mexicans who had naturalized.
• Furthermore, when the non-citizens in this sample are subdivided based on whether they had residency papers or not, we find that a lack of citizenship and a lack of authorization still do not translate into a lack of political voice during an election year. Over half of the Mexican immigrants in our study who lacked papers reported talking with others about candidates running for office in 2008. An equal number encouraged others to vote, and 12 percent – the same percentage as immigrants with papers – were active in campaigns.
Adding up these reflections, it is clear that immigrant engagement in American democracy emerges well before naturalization. Much more research is needed to interpret the “voice” expressed by the foreign-born, and whether immigrants are participating in similar ways during this current campaign cycle. The findings from 2008 illustrate an argument that was made many years ago by the political scientist E. E. Schattschneider in his classic work, The Semi-Sovereign People (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960): electoral politics is by its very nature contagious. When parties and candidates compete for office, the mass public notices, and many are irresistibly drawn towards the contest.
This pattern has been well documented for American voters. We see now that it also holds for members of the public who do not yet have voting rights but are nevertheless free – as they should be in a democracy – to express concerns about politics and take action.