Mixed Enfranchisement

The United States has been called the “first new nation,” which is to say it is the first modern Western country formed without a European feudal and aristocratic past as its historical bedrock. This means that at some basic level, American presidential elections have always hinged upon the voting efforts of immigrants. However, despite America’s status as the first new nation, the degree of success in extending voting rights to immigrants since the American Revolution can be fairly described as mixed.

During the early decades after the creation of the American nation, the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, and the early elections of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, the rate of foreign immigration into the United States was steady but slow. During the decades-long lull in significant immigration, the political identity of the United States matured. The immigrants and descendants of immigrants already on American shores began to recognize themselves as a distinct group. In terms of American political development, this was very important. Perhaps ironically, the immigrants who would later come from Europe would be seen as “outsiders” to an established political process.

Early American voting laws began to reflect this newfound electoral xenophobia. In a nation that fewer than seventy-five years earlier had been started by foreign immigrants seeking new beginnings, rules and regulations began to take shape to limit the voting rights of new immigrants. Enfranchisement is the right of a person to cast a ballot for an elected official. Its opposite, disenfranchisement, began emerging in the United States during the 1830s and 1840s.

Prior to the U.S. Civil War of 1861-1865, a partisan battle between the emergent Whigs and the Democratic Party spilled over into public law. The Democratic party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson had thrived. The Democrats had created something known as the spoils system in which party backers were rewarded with government jobs. The Whigs stood in opposition to this Democratic success and somewhat effectively united native-born voters against immigrant voting rights. In 1840, the Whigs chose as their candidate for president, William Henry Harrison, a decorated leader in the war against American Indians on the western frontier.

The Whigs perceived that the Democrats had developed an advantage over them by supporting laws allowing immigrants to vote. Indeed, the Whigs represented the more affluent and established members of American society. In early American elections, there were no voting registration laws, but as the sense of community felt by existing American residents grew, registering voters began to make sense to them. The idea of transients voting in elections was seen as something to stop by this reactionary element of the electorate. It can be argued that registration laws were first developed as a reasonable method of stopping voting fraud, but such laws were more likely enacted to discourage poor people from voting.

During the nineteenth century, the American poor were most often immigrants. With the potato blight in Ireland during the 1840s and the rapid influx of Irish Catholics to eastern urban centers, “native” Americans began to lobby for voter registration laws. Without a doubt, some of these laws were blatantly aimed at new waves of Irish, German, French, and Dutch immigrants. One anti-immigrant proposal sought to extend the length of time immigrants had to wait before they could qualify for citizenship and vote. Some anti-immigrant leaders even pushed for waiting periods as long as twenty years of citizenship before naturalized citizens could vote.

Mid-Nineteenth Century Changes

After a few years of success, the Whig Party began to fade from the national political scene during the 1850s. However, it was quickly replaced by a more insidious body—the Know-Nothings. The Know-Nothing Party had begun as a secret nativist society called the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. The party was strangely progressive on some issues, such as women’s rights, but in general, it stood for unabashed bigotry. The Know-Nothings openly expressed fear over Irish Catholic workers settling in Boston and New York. They saw the Irish as un-American and feared that they took their marching orders from the Roman Catholic pope.

Along with the surging Republicans and the fading Whigs, the Know-Nothings pushed for state voting laws establishing literacy tests and grandfather clauses. These laws required such things as civics tests and minimum-residency requirements before individuals could vote. During the nineteenth century, the legal hurdles placed in front of voters, which would later become known as Jim Crow laws, were not aimed solely at African Americans. Rather they were directed toward eastern European immigrants and others who were not established property-owning Protestants.

At various times in American history, members of very different immigrant groups have been feared for their possible political influence. Chinese immigrants in California, Italians in New York, and Cubans in Florida have all held this distinction. However, some regions of the United States have been more tolerant toward immigrants than others. For example, Minnesota and Wisconsin, perhaps because of their residents’ heritage of Scandinavian egalitarianism, have generally been more embracing of the foreign born. Likewise, immigrants who moved to the western frontier during the nineteenth century and stayed away from the eastern seaboard had a bit easier go gaining political acceptance.

Urban Political Machines

In contrast, political life during the nineteenth century could be harsh for many urban immigrants. Low-paying factory jobs and thick foreign accents did not easily gain them entry into the landed classes. The importance of property-owning status and high educational achievement made it difficult for immigrants to gain political acceptance. Consequently, local elections were often sealed off from members of poorly organized and politically naive immigrant groups, and presidential elections were generally completely out of reach of new Americans. Moreover, immigrants typically could neither run for office nor get their issues onto the political agenda.

Because immigrants lacked representation in both public candidacy and voting, their political problems were only compounded. Muckraking works such as Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle documented the harsh work and living conditions of the immigrant working poor. Their oppressed, low-class status was linked to the lack of political representation in a supposedly democratic nation. Most often presidential candidates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as James Garfield and Benjamin Harrison, did not stand strongly for immigrant and minority rights.

However, at least one political tide was turning. After the Civil War and the onset of urban industrialization, European immigrants formed close-knit communities that housed their own forms of political expression. For example, Slavic communities that provided labor for the coal industry in Pennsylvania embraced one another in insular neighborhoods. Soon enough the close-knit nature of immigrant communities, usually centered on ethnically flavored churches, lent itself naturally to political organization.

Urban political machines were born not only to clutch onto political power, but also to give a voice to immigrants. Machine politics was indeed a locally born phenomenon, but it also provided the first roots of immigrant political power exercised on a national level. Political machines taught immigrants that they could organize and help change government policies. Through the machines, immigrants learned about their civil rights and were even encouraged to cast votes for their preferred candidates. By supporting the political candidates put forward by political machines, immigrants gained patronage jobs in government. At the turn of the twentieth century, waves of new Americans were learning the lessons of politics.

American presidential elections are actually not monolithic national elections. It would be more accurate to describe them as accumulations of individual state elections that are held on the same day. The electoral votes of the individual states are aggregated to determine who the president will be, but the federal system has always granted king-making power to state electoral systems. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the individual state systems were dominated by political machines in large urban centers in which immigrants played increasingly important roles.

As urban machines composed of distinct ethnic groups gained political ground in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, they became national-level power brokers. Because immigrant political power was nested in urban centers, these machines could “deliver” votes for federal level candidates, including the presidents. Many political historians have noted that President John F. Kennedy’s electoral victory in 1960 was delivered with the blessing of the Daley machine in Chicago. However, the political power of European immigrants peaked with Kennedy’s victory.

Immigration Policy

Public policy scholars have long known that when an ethnic or racial minority candidate wins elected office, new public policy tends to more closely follow the particular needs of the candidate’s group. As European immigrants assimilated into the greater American melting pot during the mid-twentieth century, the unique needs of other immigrant groups have become more visible.

By the late twentieth century, American immigration policy debate was focusing sharply on the trials of recent Latin American immigrants. Although some immigration policy issues have diverged from their counterparts of a century earlier, commonalities have remained. For example, Hispanic immigrants have faced the same kinds of workers’ rights issues that daunted European and Asian immigrants during the nineteenth century. Perpetually assuming the role of the newcomer in a developed American economy, immigrants have always had acute concerns about workplace safety and fair wages.

Issues of political representation have remained as well. Hispanic Americans have gained ground in winning public offices, but White native-born Americans have continued to dominate campaign politics. New Mexico’s Hispanic governor Bill Richardson was a possible candidate for president in the 2008 election, but he could not match the support for fellow Democratic Party nominees Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Under the U.S. Constitution, only natural-born American citizens are eligible to become president. A child of naturalized citizens can hold the highest office, however, and some have suggested such a candidate could represent a turning point for immigrant affairs. President Obama, who made history as the nation’s first Black president, had a Kenyan father. Obama’s election was hailed by some as potentially marking an ascendancy of immigrant as well as ethnic minority candidates, although others saw Obama’s African American identity as superseding his connection to the immigrant experience.

Furthermore, in the early twenty-first century immigration remained strongly associated in public perception with Latin American countries in particular. The issue of illegal immigration especially became a key political topic, in presidential election cycles and elsewhere. Along these lines, immigrant issues were initially most salient in Mexican-border states such as Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Texas, but grew increasingly mainstream across the country. Generally, conservatives espoused stricter immigration laws while progressives emphasized human rights and the value brought by immigrants to the United States. As the political sphere became more and more divided along partisan lines, these positions became entrenched in Republican and Democratic ideologies. Both sides called for significant reform, as the treatment of apprehended undocumented immigrants and fundamental questions of the requirements of citizenship are topics that will not disappear from the political landscape until they are dealt with more soundly.

By 2008, when Obama was elected, Latin Americans and many other immigrant groups were considered dependable Democratic Party voting blocs, due largely to the Republican Party’s harsh stance on immigration. However, some analysts indicated that beyond that core issue, many immigrant populations in fact held relatively conservative social views that could align them with Republicans. Still, immigrants overall were seen as turning out in favor of Obama in his successful 2012 reelection bid.

By the 2016 presidential election, illegal immigration once again became a crucial issue in campaigning and debates. After announcing his bid for the Republican nomination in 2015, presidential candidate Donald Trump made combating illegal immigration one of the cornerstones of his platform. Trump singled out Mexican immigrants as one of the biggest threats to America, going as far as to claim that Mexico was largely sending criminals over the border. To curb immigration from Mexico, he adamantly proposed building a border wall and insisted that Mexico would pay for its construction. Additionally, Trump initially proposed banning all Muslim immigrants before altering his stance to one of “extreme vetting” in 2016. Despite widespread controversy over his xenophobic and racist rhetoric, Trump narrowly won the presidency in the Electoral College even though he lost the popular vote, indicating that his nationalist message resonated with many Americans. Indeed, the immigration issue was seen as key to Trump’s success, leading many scholars and pundits to further investigate the resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly among rural and working-class White Americans.

Trump continued to pursue anti-immigrant policies while in office, such as building the border wall and detaining and separating migrant families. He also continued to make racially charged statements around issues of immigration, for example posting on social media that several women of color U.S. Representatives should “go back” to where they came from (even though three were, in fact, born in the United States). While opponents condemned Trump’s inflammatory comments, his supporters and fellow Republicans largely played into his message of border security and, more subtly, White nationalism. This partisan division continued to play a key role in American politics heading into the 2020 presidential election, with both Republicans and Democrats using immigrant issues to motivate voters.

The Pew Research Center estimated that more than 23 million naturalized citizens were eligible to vote in the 2020 election, including 3.1 million since the 2016 election. Many of the latter individuals became naturalized, in part, to vote against Donald Trump and his administration, whose policies they felt threatened their status.

Although Democratic challenger Joseph Biden did not himself have strong ties to immigrant groups or identity, his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, was the child of Indian and Jamaican parents. Biden defeated Trump in both the Electoral College and the popular vote. Analysts noted, however, that Trump saw significant gains among Hispanic American voters (especially men) in some areas, but not enough to counter the votes of the majority of naturalized citizens who made up one in ten of the electorate.

Further Reading