As the number of illegal aliens in America has rapidly risen over the last three years, Democrats have given illegal aliens access to more welfare benefits paid for by taxpayers. Some also want to give illegal aliens the right to vote in state elections, and to give them citizenship so they can vote in national elections.
The leading Democratic blog in Virginia, Blue Virginia, recently called for giving illegal aliens more government benefits. It complained that “undocumented immigrants are barred from accessing many of the programs” paid for by taxpayers, such as “Medicaid, FAMIS (Virginia’s CHIP Program), and Affordable Care Act health coverage.” It quoted Freddy Mejia, Policy Director at The Commonwealth Institute, complaining that “undocumented immigrants “face many barriers to … accessing critical resources” paid for by taxpayers. It touted legislation to create a “health coverage program” that undocumented immigrants could benefit from, and lamented that “these efforts were stalled in the House Appropriations Committee,” which was sympathetic to the measure, but could not come up with the funds to pay for it.
Democrat-dominated California already provides lots of benefits to illegal aliens. It is spending billions of dollars to give many of them free health insurance at taxpayer expense. Economist Daniel Di Martino warned that California’s action is “turning the country into the world’s welfare magnet. The consequence will be more and, importantly, poorer and older immigrants coming to America.” When Democrat-run Illinois began covering illegal aliens, it cost far more than the state expected, and it had to cap the number of illegal aliens it covered, to keep spending down to $550 million rather than rapidly increasing to over $1 billion.
To increase Democrats’ chances of winning, progressives also want illegal aliens to be able to vote in state elections. A majority of immigrants are Democrats. As a liberal health-policy organization points out, immigrants tend to vote for the Democrats: “Immigrants overall are twice as likely to say that the Democratic Party (32%) represents their political views better than the Republican Party (16%). The gap is similar among naturalized citizens (37% say the Democratic Party, 21% say the Republican party).”
Giving illegal aliens the right to vote could let the Democrats take over state governments and then use control of state governments to assign the state’s electoral votes to the Democrats, giving Democrats an advantage in presidential elections.
Progressives increasingly argue that illegal aliens should be able to vote. As one of the Blue Virginia gang put it,
Since undocumented immigrants pay taxes — $700 million in Virginia alone — they should be allowed to vote. No taxation without representation. Nothing stops the state from letting them vote in state elections. In the 19th Century, non-citizens could vote in many cities. If undocumented immigrants could vote, Republicans would never win another statewide election in any swing state. Undocumented immigrants quite sensibly prefer Democrats, so if they could vote, Democrats would easily win control of state legislatures in swing states. Those state legislatures could then ensure victory for Democrats in national elections, by picking Democratic electors. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution lets the state legislature pick electors if it chooses — that’s what South Carolina’s legislature did before the civil war: The legislature itself picked the electors for president, rather than leaving that to the voters.
Right now, it would be risky for Democrats to let illegal aliens vote in state elections, because citizens heavily outnumber illegal aliens, and might resent having their vote diluted by giving illegal aliens the right to vote. If newly-enfranchised illegal aliens vote for Democrats, but most citizens vote for Republicans, the Democrats could lose the election.
But if the number of illegal aliens continues to rise, Democrats will have an incentive to let illegal aliens vote in state elections, and to give illegal aliens citizenship through national legislation so that they can vote everywhere in the country. The Democrats will win most elections once the people who are currently illegal aliens are able to vote.
Once illegal aliens can vote, politicians will have every incentive to pander to them, by giving them trillions of dollars out of the treasury, the way politicians already spend trillions of dollars pandering to citizens, such as Biden effectively writing off a trillion dollars worth of student loans in hopes of getting heavily-indebted young people to vote for him (many of those student-loan write-offs were illegal, according to the courts. An April 2024 report by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Biden’s student loan bailouts, put together, “will cost a combined $870 billion to $1.4 trillion.”)
But as Ballotpedia points out, many progressives are now arguing that illegal aliens should be allowed to vote (which seems unfair, because aliens can vote in their home country — why should they be able to vote in two elections, when U.S. citizens can only vote in one?). As Ballotpedia observes, as of June 2024, “the District of Columbia and municipalities in three states allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections.”
Progressives argue that “undocumented people” should be allowed to vote to promote inclusion and stop society from benefiting at the expense of “undocumented people’s labor.” Ballotpedia points out that “In a 2018 Jacobin article, political science professor Ron Hayduk of San Francisco State University argued that allowing noncitizens to vote would benefit society as a whole by promoting policy that benefits marginalized communities,” because he felt that “Allowing a permanent class of non-voters to persist on the margins” exploits “undocumented people’s labor and divide[s] workers between those with papers and those without them.”
Illegal aliens can’t even vote yet in California, but Democrats are already pandering to them by giving them taxpayer-funded benefits like free health insurance, partly because many illegal aliens in California have relatives in the state who are citizens and do vote. The pandering would be ten times worse if illegal aliens could vote.
Illegal aliens voting would likely increase the cost and expensiveness of government by a lot. Past waves of immigrants tended to vote for expansions of government, even those that economists now say were counter-productive and delayed economic recovery.
Most immigrants come from ethnic groups whose members tend to vote for bigger government: “they tend to support bigger government spending even if it means paying higher taxes.” A liberal writer in the Daily Beast (formerly Newsweek) wrote in 2016:
[W]hat’s the real reason Hispanics aren’t voting Republican? Economics…Hispanics…feel that the economic system is ‘stacked against them’ and they do ‘want stuff’ like health care, college-tuition assistance, and other government benefits that might help them get ahead. According to Pew, while only 41 percent of Americans as a whole say they want a bigger government that provides more services, a whopping 75 percent of Hispanics do…. It’s quite normal that Hispanics, whose average household income trails non-Hispanic whites by more than a third, would seek government assistance in bridging the gap.
Democrats still get most Hispanic votes today, although less lopsidedly than they did in 2012. African immigrants also tend to vote for the Democrats. Most immigration in the next century may be from Africa, rather than Latin America or Asia, because Latin American and Asian birthrates have fallen, while African birthrates remain high. African migration to the U.S. is soaring.
