A VOTE FOR NONCITIZENS?

City Council prez pushes access to rights

The City Council will consider ways it can let noncitizens vote in city elections tomorrow in a hearing on a controversial measure being pushed by Council President Andrea Campbell.

“All members of a community should have the right to participate and be included in the governance of that community,” Campbell’s order states, noting that Boston has a foreignborn population of more than 190,000, or 28 percent.

Her order also states that non-U.S. citizens paid $116 million in state and local taxes and generated over $3.4 billion in spending, according to a 2015 city report.

Campbell’s order — to explore ways noncitizens who have legal status in the United States can be given the right to vote — is cosponsored by councilors Josh Zakim, Ayanna Pressley, Lydia Edwards, Annissa Essaibi-George, Ed Flynn, Kim Janey and Michelle Wu.

The order calls for the council to “explore voting rights” for people with green cards, or legal permanent residents, as well as “visa holders, Temporary Protected status recipients, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients,” groups that include refugees granted asylum and illegal immigrants who were brought here as children.

Campbell told the Herald she wants it to apply to people who are trying to become citizens, to signal to immigrants that Boston is welcoming to them.

“I’m done saying, ‘I stand with you’ and that’s it,” Campbell said.

Enacting a law change would have to be through a home-rule petition, which would need the approval of the council, the mayor, the Legislature and the governor.

Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s office declined to take a position before there’s a specific proposal.

Campbell initially told the Herald earlier this year she was interested in letting even illegal immigrants vote, but she soon walked that back, saying that after receiving “a lot of feedback,” she adjusted her proposal to include only “immigrants with legal status.”

Hyde Park City Councilor Tim McCarthy indicated when Campbell first raised the issue earlier this year that he would push back on any attempt to change the law for Boston to allow noncitizen voting.

“Voting is a U.S. citizen’s privilege, it’s the ultimate privilege,” McCarthy said at the time. “And I for one will continue to fight that it remains that way . ... Voting for noncitizens is a step too far.”

But advocates told the Herald they like it.

“They’re paying taxes, they’re working, they’re building businesses — it’s a positive thing,” said Lew Finfer, co-director of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network, which advocates for legal and illegal immigrants.