Conservatives are warning about noncitizens voting. It's a myth with a long history
Conservatives are warning about noncitizens voting. It's a myth with a long history
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13129195
cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/politics@lemmy.ml/t/894692
The false notion that undocumented immigrants affect federal elections has a long history. But this year, due in part to rising migration at the U.S. southern border, the idea could have new potency.
I work with a guy who decided to bring up politics on Thursday, and started going on about how many illegal immigrants are voting in elections. I told him to show me a single proven instance of an illegal immigrant being allowed to legally vote in a major election and I'll sell him a bridge to Antarctica for a dollar.
This guy also started talking shit about Brendan Frasure when he heard me and the other guy we work with talking about The Mummy. Saying that he should have "just sucked it up" after being assaukted and "be a man and don't make a big deal out of it". I immediately told him "I'd think very carefully about your next words if you want to continue talking" and he decided whatever else he had to say wasn't worth saying for the rest of the day.
Also believes that immigrants are being handed free Healthcare, wic, food stamps, monetary assistance, etc which is why his daughter has to live at home without a job. Personally I don't follow the logic, but I make a point to ignore him when hes spouting bullshit so I didn't ask.
You could say conservative fear mongering about non-citizens voting in the US with no actual substance to the fear has a “long history”.
It is more accurate to say however that conservative ideology is the same handful of hateful, fearful narratives used by the rich to turn the poor against one another, repeated ad naseum over and over again throughout history, with no evolution nor critical evaluation of the validity of the ideas employed to scare and manipulate people.
When you go back in time and read the words of hateful conservative ideologies at different points in history its all the same old dumb shit modern conservatism says while pretending its ideas are new, novel or just haven’t been given a chance to truly work yet (the reason austerity for the poor didn’t work in the past was it wasn’t cruel enough!!).
“Long history” is precisely the wrong phrase to use here as it suggests a long complex story of ideas evolving, interacting, cross pollinating and splitting into new perspectives and concepts. It is rather more accurate to say that fear mongering about non-citizens voting has an extremely “short history” that has been endlessly repeated with no reflection from conservatives about the accuracy or validity of those ideas or how effective the resulting policies were to address the perceived “problem”.
You wouldn’t say a broken record left to skip and repeat the same section of a song over and over again has a “long history” of being played on the record player but rather that the record is broken…
The long history is that conservatives everywhere have a long history of lying to promote racism.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But after the Civil War and Reconstruction, a wave of migration from Europe of nonwhite, non-English-speakers led to xenophobic fears about what would happen to the U.S. if immigrants were allowed to exercise their power politically.
Migrant encounters at the southern border hit an all-time high in December, and the document focuses mostly on the implementation of a 1993 law, the National Voter Registration Act, that made registering to vote easier.
A recent study in Arizona (first reported by The Washington Post) found that less than 1% of noncitizens attempt to register to vote, and even in those cases, the vast majority are thought to be mistakes.
Earlier this year, the secretary was pushing for a constitutional amendment in Georgia to explicitly ban noncitizen voting, something a number of other states, including neighboring Alabama and Florida, also passed recently.
Legislation tracking by the nonprofit Voting Rights Lab shows that in the first few months of 2024, 17 bills have been introduced in 12 different states that involve proof of citizenship provisions.
But when asked by NPR what he thought of the false idea that President Biden was shipping in undocumented immigrants to boost his reelection bid, Raffensperger declined to comment on it.
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