“When you think about how dangerous it is to raise an issue like this,” Davis Hammet, president of Loud Light Civic Action, explained to a Kansas State House committee, “whenever something doesn’t need to be addressed — because you’re going to create a lot of public attention, a lot of debate on this, and very likely — not to say that anyone here, this is their intention — but there’s [sic] almost three million people in the state, some folks will have very xenophobic and potentially violent outlooks on immigration.”
Hammet then asked legislators to “consider the Garden City bombing plot,” a 2016 case in which three Kansas men were arrested and convicted of conspiring to bomb a housing complex with many Somali immigrants.
Wait … what issue — “like this” — is he talking about?
Mr. Hammet testified against House Concurrent Resolution 5004, a constitutional amendment introduced by Rep. Pat Procter, clarifying that only U.S. citizens are eligible voters in all Kansas elections, state and local.
“This legally and practically won’t do anything,” asserted Hammet.
Far from the truth, legally.
Kansas has the same language in its constitution’s suffrage provision as California and Vermont, where courts have upheld the constitutionality of noncitizen voting at the local level. Plus, by placing citizen-only voting in the state constitution, Kansans can guarantee their power to vote yes or no before any future state legislature or city council could legalize non-citizen voting.
Twenty-one cities across the U.S. now give the vote to noncitizens, most also allow those here illegally to vote. Meanwhile,in recent years nearly 30 million Americans in 14 states have voted by whopping margins to enact Citizen Only Voting Amendments like HCR 5004, eight of those states last November.
“But it could create fuel on the fire for some radical groups,” speculates Hammet, “to feel like they’re motivated to take improper actions.”
Yet so far without a single fatality! No fisticuffs or riots or bombings attributed to the debate or the public vote. Not one incident.
Hammet may sound high-minded, throwing around words like “xenophobic,” but note his paranoia about his fellow citizens handling political issues. Moreover, he fails to recognize that the policy he sees as “anti-immigrant” is, in actual fact, overwhelmingly supported by immigrants.
So, who’s the xenophobe?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: HCR 5004 passed that committee and then passed the House on a vote of 98 to 20. The amendment now awaits action in the Kansas State Senate in order to be referred to the voters.
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7 replies on “Blood in the Streets?”
What, though, is the real issue? How much would we care about towns and cities granting votes to immigrants if those votes had no effect beyond the proper limits of the state?
Thanks to “progressives”, the idea has been enshrined that a plurality of voters may directly or indirectly empower the government to loot the possessions of disfavored groups.
I will grant that extending the vote to still more people who ought not to have such power is a decidedly bad idea, and that people who are trying to use such an extension to improve their political fortunes ought to be denounced.
But I think that always we should return to the deeper problem.
We might even each time offer the weeeasels a bargain that they will not accept — an extension of the franchise in exchange for an end to spoilation. The offer would, of course, simply rub their noses in the truth.
There’s no such category of people as “those here illegally” (see Article I, Section 9 and Amendment 10 of the US Constitution, and Madison v. Marbury).
As for voting, why should one polity (for example, a state) get to decide who can vote in another polity’s (for example, a town’s) elections?
And why should those who aren’t allowed to vote consider themselves obligated by the laws (including the tax demands) of the polity so excluding them?
Citing Madison v Marbury and thus indirectly citing Article VI Clause 2 (establishing supremacy of the US Constitution over all other legislation), rather than just citing that Clause directly, seems a bit silly.
Article I Section 9 Clause 1 denies the Federal government a right to restrict any sort of immigration before the year 1808, except in-so-far as a tax not exceeding $10 may be imposed on each person, implying that thereafter such a right otherwise would exist, and would exist beginning in 1808. While plainly the importation of persons as slaves was particularly in mind, the clause is in far more general terms: “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.”
Amendment 10 of course reserves to the people and to the states and powers not given by the Constitution to the Federal government. But Article I Section 9 Clause 1 has done that for immigration.
After 1808, a constitutional amendment would have been required to create a federal power to regulate immigration (see Amendment 10). No such amendment has ever been proposed by 2/3 of both houses of Congress and ratified by 3/4 of the state legislatures.
Congress understood that to be the case until the 1880s — even after an activist SCOTUS miracled up such a power out of its collective ass in 1875 (Chy Lung v. Freeman), Congress predicated the first federal immigration regulation, the Chinese Exclusion Act, on treaty provisions rather than on that SCOTUS ruling.
It’s been a downhill slide from there, but a slow one at first. It wasn’t until the 1890s that the feds took over immigrant processing from the Port Authority of New York and opened Ellis Island. It wasn’t until 1947 that a passport was required to enter or leave the United States, and even after that not at the Mexican or Canadian border until after 911.
Am I surprised that Congress has just ignored the Constitution on that subject for more than a century now? Of course not. The Constitution ALWAYS gets ignored when it’s inconvenient (see Lysander Spooner on its unfitness to exist).
But there’s no reason to pretend that federal immigration regulation is constitutional. The Constitution itself clearly, unambiguously, and irrefutably says otherwise, and it does so for a reason (Pennsylvania refused to ratify a constitution WITH any such power).
You’re attempting just to power-through the plain language of Article I Section 9 Clause 1.
If an Amendment had been necessary to grant Congress the right to control Migration (explicitly mentioned) then an Amendment would have been necessary to grant Congress the right to control Importation. And, with so many Founding Fathers still alive, the outlawing of Importation would have been dead in its tracks.
Anti-immigration sentiment long pre-dated the 1880s; but the anti-immigrant parties did not pursue an empowering Amendment because they did not need one; they needed and lacked other things.
“If an Amendment had been necessary to grant Congress the right to control Migration (explicitly mentioned) then an Amendment would have been necessary to grant Congress the right to control Importation.”
I’m not sure what you mean by “explicitly mentioned.” The only explicit mention of immigration in the Constitution is the 20-year ban on any congressional power to regulate it. After which an amendment would have been needed to create such a power.
Importation, on the other hand, was already covered under the international commerce clause.
There’s nothing esoteric involved. It was debated prior to ratification, and Congress understood its meaning for nearly a century before an activist SCOTUS said “nah, don’t worry about the Constitution, that power exists because we waaaaaaaannnnnnnntttttttt it to exist.”
No. The twenty-year ban made absolutely no sense if a permanent ban were already in place. The ban isn’t a ban on amending the Constitution to give Congress such power; its a ban on exercising such power.
As to the Commerce Clause, immigrants bring with them productive capacity; historically, hostility to immigration has largely been driven by a desire to reduce or eliminate immigrants as factors of production.