Democracy for All : Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the U.S.

Examining the politics of voting in the United States, this book shows how voting rights can empower minority groups. It presents arguments for and against non-citizen voting rights, and also examines contemporary political organisations and actors, who fought for and against campaigns to reinstate non-citizen voting.

Voting is for citizens only, right? Not exactly. It is not widely known that immigrants, or noncitizens, currently vote in local elections in over a half dozen cities and towns in the U.S.; nor that campaigns to expand the franchise to noncitizens have been launched in at least a dozen other jurisdictions from coast to coast over the past decade. These practices have their roots in another little-known fact: for most of the country''s history - from the founding until the 1920s - noncitizens voted in forty states and federal territories in local, state, and even federal elections, and also held public office such as alderman, coroner, and school board member. Globally, over forty countries on nearly every continent permit voting by noncitizens. Legal immigrants, or resident aliens, pay taxes, own businesses and homes, send their children to public schools, and can be drafted or serve in the military, yet proposals to grant them voting rights are often met with great resistance. But, in a country where no taxation without representation was once a rallying cry for revolution, such a proposition may not, after all, be so outlandish.

Democracy for All examines the politics and practices of noncitizen voting in the United States, chronicling the rise and fall - and re-emergence - of immigrant voting in the U.S. In addition to making the case for noncitizen voting, this book takes a close look at the politics of and actors in recent campaigns that successfully reestablished noncitizen voting, others that failed, and ones that are currently underway. Democracy for All explores the prospects for a truly universal suffrage in America.