Residency Requirements Quotes
At that time a number of state legislatures all changed their state voting laws to require citizens who try to register to vote to have documentation of various kinds and or obtain special documentation. These were generally possessed by upper class and educated people but not in as large proportions by lower and working class people. To obtain the documents and register if things like original birth certificates were not possessed, the citizen had to lose much of a day’s work and travel some distance. The burden existed on most lower class people and especially the minorities. The courts nullified some of these discriminatory requirements for voter registration, but many were allowed. The rationale was to prevent voter fraud and yet there were almost no cases of voter fraud in the entire country. While the requirements were racially discriminatory, they were also socioeconomically discriminatory. By coincidence, or perhaps not, every state that added these requirements had a Republican controlled state legislature AND a Republican Governor. Despite the effort to suppress Obama and Democratic voters, the effort backfired. Minorities and especially Blacks were so outraged that Jim Crow voting suppression had returned that they made a huge effort to register and get out the vote and Blacks voted in a much larger proportion than historical and well over 90 percent voted for Obama who won the election handily.
The 14th Amendment made the Black slaves and their families all citizens as most people know, but it had two other important aspects. It prohibited the individual states from deciding who who was and was not a citizen of the country and the state. In addition, it guaranteed that anyone born in the United States was a citizen regardless of the status of his parents—citizens or not, illegal immigrants or legal.
The highest court in New York. At the time only U. S. citizens could own land. Since the majority of the population were farmers, this was a critical limitation with a major inducement to citizenship. Today, that motivation is no more, and critics of our immigration policy are concerned that there is no longer the desire and commitment to be American but just to make money from the American economy with a cultural and political allegiance elsewhere,
