Abstract
This paper analyzes how the belief and fear by mostly older, white voters, politicians, and poll workers that “illegal” Latino immigrants were seeking to vote in local elections led to stigmatization of and discrimination against some Latino citizen voters in Port Chester, New York. Stoked by and closely echoing national voter ID law rhetoric, this fear fueled an “illegal Latino voter threat” narrative. This article documents how Port Chester’s leaders and citizens repeated this narrative in public life, sometimes enacting it in politics, including in voting. The resultant stigma denies Latino voters the presumed legitimacy other citizens enjoy, discrediting them in one word: illegal. Such processes harm democracy in Port Chester and America, and were on display in the 2016 presidential election.
- © 2017 Russell Sage Foundation. Smith, Robert Courtney. 2017. “’Don’t Let the Illegals Vote!’: The Myths of Illegal Latino Voters and Voter Fraud in Contested Local Immigrant Integration.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 3(4): 148–75. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2017.3.4.09. I would like to thank the volume editors, anonymous reviewers, Suzanne Nichols, and other staff at the Russell Sage Foundation for their especially diligent work on my paper and this volume. I also thank Manuel Garcia y Griego, Lori Minnite, John Mollenkopf, Jeffrey Passel, and Harel Shapira for giving insightful comments on an earlier version of the paper; and Andrew A. Beveridge for collaborating on the survey. Robert Smith and Andrew A. Beveridge gratefully acknowledge the support of the CUNY Collaborative Incentive Research Grant #1857, Cycle 18, “Contested Immigrant Integration and American Institutions, 2011–2012.” Direct correspondence to: Robert Courtney Smith at robert.smith{at}baruch.cuny.edu, Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, Box D0901, 1 Bernard Baruch Way, New York, NY 10010.
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