CHICAGO TRIBUNE -- “Non-citizen voting was seen as a means to train newcomer white Christian men to be good neighbors and promote active participation in the life of their new homes before their eventual naturalization,” wrote San Francisco State University political scientist Ron Hayduk in a 2018 essay in Jacobin magazine.
“After the Civil War, non-citizen voting rights were introduced throughout the South and into the West, spurred on by the need for new labor,” wrote Hayduk, author of the 2006 book “Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States.” “The expansive voting rights provided an incentive for newcomers to settle in the new territories and states, helping fuel settler colonialism. More positively, non-citizen voting also fueled immigrant political engagement and incorporation.”