Voting, not just for citizens anymore.

So I did a little checking around. Here are the requirements of the United States for voting.

• You must be a citizen of the U.S.
• You must be a resident of the U.S.
• You must be at least 18 years of age.
• You must be registered to vote (there is some wiggle room from state to state on this last one.)

However the big one that you should be looking at for this post, is numero uno. The first one of the list. You must be a citizen of the United States to vote. It doesn’t matter how many years you’ve lived here, how many jobs you’ve held, or whether you are here legally (with a green card or student/work visa) or illegally (whether you are from Ireland, Canada, Britain, Mexico, Egypt, or any other country). You CANNOT vote in federal or state elections if you are not a citizen, got it. Is this clear?

You would think so. It seems cut and dried, black and white, you get the picture.

But apparently, for some reason that god only knows the logic behind, John DeStefano Jr., the Mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, has decided that the constitution just isn’t good enough. (He’s a Democrat, why am I surprised?) He wants to extend voting rights to illegal aliens as well. Of course this a the man who said:

participating in the federal Secure Communities program would undermine the city’s renewed emphasis on community policing and destroy the good relationship that has been established between authorities and the city’s growing community of undocumented immigrants.

“The key to community policing is a relationship of trust and direct engagement with the community. Secure Communities will destroy the essential element of trust,” DeStefano said at a press conference outside the Columbus Family Academy in Fair Haven, where many of the immigrants live.

- New Haven Register

DeStefano’s exact words about why they should allow illegal immigrants to vote was that it was “to build a more engaged participatory community”.

Somehow I don’t think that we need to be engaging illegal aliens who have broken a federal law to come into this country (which, I might add, means they have committed a felony already and have lost the right to vote) more in our community. I think that actively shunning them is more the right action to be honest. Besides, one would tend to think that by committing said felony that the “essential element of trust” would have already been destroyed by those doing the illegal entering, don’t you think DeStefano?

I don’t care who you are, why you are here, where you are from. If you enter this country unlawfully, you have committed a crime. You have done wrong. There is no way around that. People from all around the world want to come to our country, or they did at one point in our history, but they all got in line to do it the right way. One of my best friends from high school just recently received his full citizenship, legally. Sure, it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, but it was the right way to do it. Any legal immigrant who went through all the red tape to come to this country should be horrified and disgusted at those that cut in line and do things the “easy way”. They belittle the hard work of legal immigrants by demanding all of the benefits, but refusing to go through the same struggles.

Morons like DeStefano aren’t doing this country, or legal citizens of this country, any favors. He makes me ashamed to admit that I spent even a year of my life living in New Haven, even if it was between the ages of 2 weeks and 1 year.

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