Bush’s “Citizenship Tax” Reminiscent of Texas Poll Tax

This is significant because under Bush the Republican Party has reached out to Latino voters. Bush appointed Latinos to his administration and he proposed immigration reform (backed by big business but opposed to by xenophobic interests in his party).

Latinos, like that of Irish and Italian immigrants before them, have followed a similar pattern. New arrivals are brought into the political process by Democrats who champion working family issues and seek to empower societal minorities.

It is not surprising that Franklin Roosevelt was the first president to actively seek Latino voters. Latinos were (a small) part of quarter of the U.S. population in the 1930s and 1940s that was either “foreign born” or the children of immigrants.

Republicans typically courted Latinos only after a sector of the community had started to move into the middle class. President Eisenhower courted Latino voters in the 1950s, focusing on small businessmen, professionals and Protestants.

This trend continued into the 1960s. John F. Kennedy brought thousands of new voters into the system. He encouraged large scale voter registration drive among Puerto Ricans in New York and Mexican Americans in California. Viva Kennedy clubs established themselves in two-dozen states.

President Richard Nixon followed-up on this. In 1971, he appointed Ramona Bañuelos, a Los Angeles tortilla manufacturer, as the secretary of the Treasury, and the first Latino in a presidential cabinet. Nixon was also the first presidential candidate to raise a significant amount of campaign money from Latinos.

Accordingly, the basic parameters of national Latino politics were set. Democrats welcomed new voters and sought to drive Latinos to the polls. Republicans courted segments of the community that were most likely to support its business-oriented agenda.

Bush sought to change the dynamic by creating a softer image as a “compassionate conservative,” who as a Texan understood the Latino family-oriented community. He also learned from Pete Wilson, his Republican counterpart in California, who sought to deny education and health care for children without documents.

Wilson’s support for the infamous Proposition 187 proved two things. First, a lot a middle class Latinos object to what is perceived as a general attack on the community. Second, more than a million immigrants went through the process to become citizens — to become eligible to vote — in the immediate aftermath of Proposition 187.
President Clinton, seeking Democratic votes in California, reduced the bureaucratic backlog in processing citizenship applications. For him, good politics was also good public policy.

This brings us back to Bush. His effort to create an economic burden to citizenship is eerily similar to the Texas poll tax. This policy, practiced into the 1960s, literally required Texas voters to pay for the privilege of casting a ballot.

The poll tax was technically color blind, but it had a disproportional impact on Latinos and African Americans, many of whom were on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. The poll tax also hurt poor white, as does Bush’s “citizenship tax.”

In America, every vote counts equally, regardless of one’s social position. This is central to our democracy. Bush’s new tax on citizenship threatens this cherished notion and must be vigorously rejected.

Kenneth C. Burt is the political director of the California Federation of Teachers. A graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard University, Burt worked for Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and is a board member for the Pat Brown Public Policy Institute.The author of a number of books and articles on California history, Burt may be reached at KennethBurt.com.