I saw Selma last night. It is a powerful film. I was struck by how so many of the top roles were played by Brits (MLK, Coretta, LBJ, Wallace), and very well, I thought. I also started to wonder why voting rights have been mostly absent from the immigrant rights agenda. I think about two scenarios that highlight the injustice of the current voting regime in the U.S.: 1. I have several clients who have lived in the U.S. since they were toddlers, but for whom it is legally impossible to get from Point A (undocumented or DACA status) to Point B (citizen with voting rights). There is no line to get into and no way for them to apply for permanent residence, a legal prerequisite to citizenship. They are indefinitely barred from the franchise. 2. I have some clients who are longtime permanent residents but who face restrictions on access to citizenship that effectively bar them indefinitely from the franchise. For example, (a) most applicants must demonstrate written and verbal English proficiency, but for many of them, it is nearly impossible to reach the necessary level of proficiency due to, e.g., lack of access to affordable ESL classes, lack of time to attend them, and existing educational barriers (many dropped out of school at a young age in their birth countries). (b) for applicants who are illiterate in any language, the English-language test for naturalization functions as a literacy test which directly parallels a classic Jim Crow tactic that barred blacks from the franchise; (c) the $680 application fee excludes many people from naturalization and directly parallels the Jim Crow poll tax. There is a fee waiver available, but most people who cant afford the filing fee will not be successful in filing a fee waiver application, since DHS wants its money and denies fee waivers if the 5-page form is not correctly prepared. Such applicants need legal assistance to fill out the fee waiver application, which will usually cost as much or more than the filing fee, even at most nonprofit organizations. The limited number of free naturalization legal clinics come nowhere near to meeting the demand; (d) Overzealous DHS adjudicators deny lots of applicants who do meet the standards. The vaunted path to citizenship is littered with landmines, especially for low-income people, especially for undocumented people. For so many years in the South, formal recognition of the franchise was used to obscure the reality of Jim Crow measures which excluded blacks from the franchise. Segregationists could point to the Constitution and claim that blacks had the right to vote. They would defer legal authority, as Gov. Wallace did in the film, to county registrars, who in practice denied registration to all black applicants. Similarly, the technical possibility of being able to vote at some far-distant time for some immigrants is used to justify indefinite, and often permanent, exclusion from the franchise. And this is hardly questioned. The fact that so many immigrants cant vote is one of the reasons that Congress has not passed a broad legalization law and is not likely to for many years. And even if such a law were passed--for instance, the 2013 Senate bill--less than half (probably less than a third) of the 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. would ever become citizens under the current legal regime. Those those who did make it wouldnt get there for anywhere from 5 to 15 years or more. So who wants to sue the government? Feel free to message me if youd like to discuss this further.
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 21:07:58 +0000
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