Effort to Allow 'Alien Suffrage' Has Reemerged

A movement to allow noncitizens to vote in New York City's municipal elections is emerging again after the mayor rejected the idea last spring.

A bill to allow "alien suffrage," as it is sometimes called, will be introduced at City Hall by the end of the year, the City Council member drafting the legislation, Bill Perkins, said. Meanwhile, unions and immigrant groups have been actively mobilizing around the issue, meeting with politicians and editors of foreign-language publications to build momentum for noncitizen voting.

Advocates of the measure argue that voting in local elections justly enfranchises a significant component of the taxpaying population, since the city has more than 1 million legal residents of voting age.

Opponents maintain that voting is a privilege that should be reserved for citizens. Noncitizens' voting rights could become a divisive issue in the 2005 mayoral campaign. One of the mayor's likely opponents, Fernando Ferrer, is a vocal supporter of the proposal.

"Obviously, it will be an issue that will have some resonance with respect to these upcoming elections," Mr. Perkins, Democrat of Manhattan, said. "The immigrant population is growing by leaps and bounds, to the point where a substantial proportion of our community for which our decisions are being made cannot vote.

"We have a tradition where we've tried to expand voting opportunities from the beginning of the country," Mr. Perkins continued, saying the basis of the argument is "no taxation without representation."

Alien suffrage is not new. Foreign citizens voted in many parts of America for more than 150 years, but the practice died out entirely after World War I. In recent years it has been revived in little-noticed school board elections in Chicago, local elections in Maryland, and voting for New York City's community school boards until they were disbanded in 2002. A bill was introduced in the City Council of Washington in July to allow noncitizen residents to vote in municipal elections.

"When you have communities where you have very large numbers of people who cannot or will not vote, it gives government a free pass," a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and a director of the Immigrant Voting Project, Michele Wucker, said.

Ms. Wucker and other advocates are careful to stress that the proposal is for local elections only, in which noncitizen immigrants are directly affected by policy decisions.

Mr. Ferrer, a Democrat and former Bronx borough president, staked out his position on alien suffrage more than a year ago. After Mayor Bloomberg's Charter Revision Commission briefly considered and dropped the issue, Mr. Ferrer wrote a letter to Mr. Bloomberg suggesting that he "consider this proposal and its implications for your constituents."

"It's a matter of fairness," Mr. Ferrer told The New York Sun last September. "If a citizen were barred for some reason or another from participating in the franchise some might say, 'Wait a minute, we pay taxes, what are they talking about here.' "

Yesterday, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ferrer, Jen Bluestein, said his position was the same, and he hopes the mayor and the council will examine the issue "and treat it with the seriousness it deserves."

The mayor has worked to define himself as a pro-immigrant Republican, going so far as to reverse an executive order last year to protect undocumented immigrants. But on immigrant voting he has taken a more traditional position. Last April Mr. Bloomberg said on his weekly radio program on WABCAM that "the essence of citizenship is the right to vote, and you should go about becoming a citizen before you get the right to vote."

Public support for the measure, even in a heavily immigrant city like New York, remains uncertain, with critics arguing alien suffrage would dilute the notion of citizenship and discourage immigrants from naturalizing.