If Donald Trump and JD Vance have done as they intended and stirred in your heart all kinds of xenophobic hate and fear of Haitians , Venezuelans and others, the Kentucky General Assembly has some good news for you.
You’ll be able to tell them what you think of them on Election Day when you’re asked to cast your vote on constitutional Amendment 1 , which does absolutely nothing but make you feel like you’ve stood up to the immigrants Trump and Vance seem to dislike so much.
It’s almost as if Republicans in Frankfort knew that Trump’s main message was going to be a divisive one intended to separate us by the color of our skin and the nation of our birth.
What the amendment does is changes the Kentucky Constitution to say that people who are not U.S. citizens are not allowed to vote in Kentucky.
Whoa, boy.
Some of you are thinking, “Well, of course I’m going to vote for that. People who aren’t citizens ought not be able to vote.”
The problem is that non-citizens aren’t voting.
Both federal and state law prohibit people who are not citizens from voting in state and federal elections.
Some cities in other states have passed laws allowing non-citizens to vote in certain local elections, but Josh Douglas, a voting rights expert and law professor at the University of Kentucky said under existing state law, local governments don’t have the power to do that here.
“Non-citizens cannot vote in any election in Kentucky currently, and the legislature would need to change the law on home rule to allow it,” he said.
And that ain’t going to happen.
Democrats had complete control of the legislature for more than 100 years after the current state Constitution passed in 1891 and never changed the law to allow non-citizens to vote.
And it’s just as unlikely that the Republicans who hold veto-proof majorities in both the House and Senate would change the law to allow that sort of thing.
Amendment 1 spreads Trump's and Vance's anti-immigrants message
So, essentially, the amendment does nothing to stop non-citizens from voting.
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But what it does do is reaffirms the message that Trump has spread since he announced his bid for the presidency in 2015 – that we can’t trust immigrants and we need to build a wall (either real or metaphorical) between immigrants and ourselves.
He did that when he accused Mexicans of being racists, when one of his first actions as president was to ban immigration from Muslim countries, and when he and Vance accused Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, of eating people’s pets.
That’s why the Republicans in the state legislature pushed through a constitutional amendment that does nothing – to play on the fear and anger Trump has stoked toward the immigrant community.
“Unfortunately, it is an election year and in this election year our politicians have found it easy to follow someone who thinks he can win elections by pitting people against each other,” said Muhammad Babar, an American citizen who emigrated from Pakistan nearly three decades ago.
That’s why he thinks the amendment is on the ballot – simply to pit citizens against non-citizens and to strike a blow at immigration.
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“This is the strength of America,” Babar, a medical doctor, said of immigration. “We see over the last 300 years we have attracted good, talented people because they knew they would be treated fairly here.”
Anti-immigration is anti-American
He worries the anti-immigration zeal will forever change the country in a bad way. “It is anti-American,” he said. “We are going against the soul of America.”
He’s right.
We’ve gone through periods like this in our past when we have turned our backs on the very people who have always been the lifeblood of our country.
Whether it was the Know-Nothings of the mid-1800s who hated Catholics – especially Irish and German Catholics – or the anti-Asian policies of the late 1800s, or the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 that largely barred the immigration of Asians and Jews, we’ve gone through periods like this in our past.
Each time, we’ve eventually come to our senses and began welcoming immigrants once again.
Amendment 1 doesn’t really change our laws, but it says volumes about who we are as a people and that’s what it was meant to do. It was designed to rile us up and get us out to vote against the immigrants.
It just reaffirms – as if it isn’t already clear to the Haitians, Venezuelans and others who have been demonized of late – that they aren’t us. It’s politics at their worst.
Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Opinion | Gerth: Amendment 1 stirs anti-immigrant hate and solves a non-existent problem
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