February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
A bill, expected to be completed by early June, proposes to extend voting rights to legal residents of all nationalities, Irish included.
“What we are proposing is the right thing to do. It is the New York tradition and an American tradition,” City Council Member Bill Perkins said Tuesday.
Perkins, the Council’s deputy majority leader, is co-author of the bill that will likely be considered by the council’s Government Operations Committee before it goes to a full vote.
Perkins chairs that committee.
He said that the bill was intended to benefit legal city residents of all national backgrounds, including the Irish.
“This is across the board and is not just about Hispanics,” he said.
Perkins said that he believed all legal city residents who paid their taxes should be allowed vote.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, however, has indicted his likely opposition to such a bill. In his weekly radio program, he said that the essence of citizenship was the right to vote.
“And you should go about becoming a citizen before you get the right to vote,” Bloomberg said.
However, Council Member Perkins said he believed that the mayor could be persuaded to change his opinion. And if he didn’t, there was the possibility of overriding any veto he might impose on the proposed legislation. The Council, said Perkins, had done just that on 15 occasions over the last couple of years.
An override requires the support of two thirds of the 51-member council.
Perkins said that flexibility had always been a factor in citizenship and voting rights. Voting, he said, was once restricted to white men who owned property and was denied women of all ages, and later anyone under 21 years of age until the constitution was amended to extend voting rights to all over 18.
Perkins said that being legal and allowed to vote was “a good step” toward full U.S. citizenship. “How does it hurt?” You practice citizenship by voting and it makes politicians like us more accountable,” he said. “This country was born under the cry of no taxation without representation.”
Against the backdrop of the debate over votes for legal residents, the Emerald Isle Immigration Center in Queens has been attempting to persuade many Irish green card holders to take the extra step to full American citizenship.
Siobhan Dennehy, the Emerald Isle’s executive director, said that many Irish who secured green cards a decade ago in the Morrison Visa lottery were currently visiting the center seeking help in renewing their green cards.
Dennehy, who recently became a U.S. citizen, said that the Emerald Isle’s policy was to encourage people to become citizens, so this, she conceded, would place the center more in line with Mayor Bloomberg’s view on the city voting issue.
The majority, about 60-70 percent, of green card-holding Irish who were visiting Emerald Isle were considering the full citizenship route, Dennehy said.
Should legislation extending the franchise to legal residents ultimately pass, meanwhile, expanded voting rights would be confined to New York City’s five boroughs.
Legal residents would still be precluded from voting in state and federal elections until such time as they became U.S. citizens.
If the legislation does pass, it would, however, offer an irony-laden choice to New York green card Irish who decided not to become full American citizens. They would find themselves entitled to significant voting rights on American soil even as their voting rights on Irish soil were denied, this despite their full Irish citizenship.