San Francisco offers noncitizens a voice in local election
San Francisco in November will become the largest city in the nation to allow noncitizens the chance to vote in a local election, making the city once again a flashpoint in the debate about immigration.
Noncitizens, including those without legal status, will only be allowed to vote in a school board race and only a little more than 40 have registered to vote so far.
Still, the decision carries major symbolic force and has become the latest punching bag for conservatives who already are using California’s efforts to protect people in this country illegally from President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown as a political issue in the midterm election.
California has gone further than any other state in offering opportunities to those here illegally, including providing driver’s licenses, college tuition breaks and child health care. Voting has been a more sensitive topic, but experts said it fits both the larger political trends in California as well as the conservative backlash.
“It will speak to that sort of sense that change is coming to the United States and that change is being done extralegally somehow,” said Louis DeSipio, a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine.
It’s no surprise San Francisco’s action will further rally conservatives, who are also using the exodus of thousands of Central Americans headed to the U.S. border en masse as an issue, said Robin Hvidston, executive director of We the People Rising, a Claremont, Calif., organization that lobbies for stricter immigration enforcement.
“Noncitizen voting is a very contentious issue,” Hvidston said. “The move to extend voting rights to those illegally residing in San Francisco has the potential to backfire among citizens with a moderate stance on illegal immigration.”
In the last week, alt-right publications, anti-illegal immigration activists and nationalist online chat rooms have grabbed on to the issue. A tweet posted this week by World Net Daily to promote a story about the election reads: “The gates have now been opened to letting non-citizens to vote. Is this the beginning of the end?”
Conservative state Assemblyman Travis Allen chimed in, tweeting: “**** ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS NOW VOTING in @GavinNewsom’s San Francisco **** Non-citizens now ‘eligible’ to vote in November’s local election due to Democrat ordinance. The CA Democrat Party has gone too far. It’s time we TAKE BACK CALIFORNIA!!”
Shamann Walton, a San Francisco Unified School District commissioner who introduced a resolution to the school board in support of the measure in 2016, said he doesn’t buy into the rhetoric from the right.
“At the end of the day, for me it’s important that families who have children in our school to have a say,” he said.
The San Francisco Unified School District doesn’t keep track of how many of its students or parents are noncitizens. The district website reports that 29 percent of its 54,063 students are Englishlanguage learners — an indication of the size of the district’s immigrant population. An estimated 35,000 people without legal status live in San Francisco, according to a 2017 Pew Research report.