Murray: Immigrant voting an affront to democracy

“The town of Boston,” a 1771 Massachusetts colonial governor complained to his predecessor, “is the source from whence all the other parts of the Province derive more or less troubled water.”

The defiant stance of those early whigs, and their cussed purely American determination to create a new nation, could not have foreseen that their sacrifices would eventually produce a public servant such as outgoing Democratic Socialist Boston City Councilor Kendra Lara. Her home rule petition to give noncitizens the right to vote in municipal elections seems to treat so much of what we hold sacred in this city of the Freedom Trail as passing fashions for old timers.  Progressives like Lara can’t see that the democratic traditions of Boston shine far brighter than a Revere bowl to the world.

Voters are like jurors and their worth and truthfulness to their duty must be vetted. The nascent American republic and its urban centers matured, and found that the best way to govern ourselves was to allow only citizens to vote. This notion of vetting an immigrant before allowing him to live in full accord with the body politic of his adopted country comes down to us from ancient Israel and was examined under the philosophy of the Greeks and Christians.  It could take two generations or more for some foreigners to be fully accepted into ancient Israel.  “The reason for this was that if foreigners were allowed to meddle with the affairs of a nation as soon as they settled down in its midst,” Saint Thomas Aquinas logically reasoned, “many dangers might occur, since the foreigners not yet having the common good firmly at heart might attempt something hurtful to the people.”

As the nation grew, Massachusetts led the states in having clean and clear voting rules, being the first state to adopt the Australian voting reforms. Most revisions have been washed away by post COVID “reformers” on Beacon Hill. Allowing the home rule petition for noncitizen voting will introduce new elements of doubt in our elections.

Jessica Vaughan of the Centers for Immigration Studies rivaled Aquinas and in her written testimony for the petition hearing stated  “The right to vote…should not be casually extended to non-citizens, especially not those who are new arrivals, or those who have no intention of ever pledging allegiance to our republic, or fully embracing Boston as their home.  Instead, the city should focus on helping legal immigrants become citizens, and welcome their voices when they do.”

According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University over 257,000 migrants have crossed America’s open southern border and recently registered with the Boston immigration court.

Shawn Nelson, born and bred in Dorchester, and a former candidate for City Council At Large highlighted where this law could ultimately conflict with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 when he said, “Allowing aliens the vote will shift the power dynamics in Boston in a major way.  We do not have the numbers or the information to know how badly it is going to impact African-American voters…Before the council takes any further action they need to study the impact further.”

Expanding Boston’s municipal voting population to foreign citizens and residents undermines the meaning of citizenship and is an insult to Black Americans who fought to have their voices heard at the ballot box for over half a century.  Every Bostonian has probably gazed in awe at the tower of the Old North Church or stood with pride on the deck of Old Ironsides. For the next 12months we’ll be encouraged to celebrate the rebellion of the Boston Tea Party.  If Boston is to flourish as a city again, we must embrace our defiant founding and citizenship. Let’s start by metaphorically dumping progressive dreams of borderless cities into the harbor.

Louis Murray is a citizen of Boston and a frequent contributor to the Boston Herald.  He tweets on the  X platform @LouisLMurrayJr1.