Residency Is Not Enough: Khamis on Citizenship Voting Debate

Johnny Khamis, former councilmember and candidate for County Supervisor District 1, brings a special perspective to the discussion of the relationships between citizenry, residency, voting rights, and immigration status: He and his family are immigrants to the United States from Beirut, Lebanon (1976), and naturalized U.S. citizens. He speaks to Opp Now in an exclusive interview.

Opportunity Now: People often mistakenly conflate immigration policy concerns with voting rights. Let's take them one at a time. What's your take on the issues with the country's immigration system?

Johnny Khamis: It's extremely laborious and unfair. It takes too long to gain citizen status and you have to jump through too many hoops. I have worked hard as a councilmember and before lobbying Congress to fix the immigration pains that we are going through. There's a lot in the system that needs fixing.
But the only way to solve this is to address is at the national level. Efforts to fix immigration by piecemeal actions at the local level don't address the bigger issues, and just increase complexity and churn. That's not what immigrants want or need.

ON: The SJ City Council voted to study letting foreign national immigrants who are not U.S. citizens vote in San Jose elections. Feels like the complexity quotient just went through the roof.

JK: I have a lot of concerns about this idea, as it raises an avalanche of questions. How can it be done fairly? What, if any, waiting period will there be? How will people prove residency? Will it apply to students? That's just for starters. There are so many "ifs" and hypotheticals that make this idea very problematic--and that's assuming we can even prove we have a problem regarding immigrant voting that needs solving.

ON: It appears that proponents of the idea suggest that residency is enough to demand suffrage.

JK: Is residency really all you need to deserve the right to vote? It's important to appreciate the place you have chosen to make your adopted home--to understand and respect its political history, norms, and processes. My family and I went through nine years of waiting to become citizens. We had to study and take tests and pledge allegiance to this country. I believe those are good things to have citizens do and good things for voters to do. It probably shouldn't take nine years, but It helps build one's appreciations for the land you are calling your home. It's part of a commitment to your home and systems that support it.

ON: Most immigrants are citizens of another country. Do you think citizenship is interchangeable, that the difference between being, say, a Russian citizen and a U.S. citizen is no big deal?

JK: There are a lot of differences, and those differences need to be respected for the process to have integrity. For an election to be trusted, for an outcome to be acceptable, the people involved have to feel that everybody is playing by the same rules. If not, if people have reason to doubt the equity of the system, you are inviting trouble.

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Photo by Phil Roeder.