t was 1986 and New York’s public school system was run by a patchwork of elected local school boards, all of them hotbeds for fiery debates about how kids were learning — or weren’t.
Like most school board elections in America, turnout was low, producing opportunities for small voting blocs to shape the outcome. One group of concerned parents saw the opening: immigrants.
New York’s school board races stood out among American elections because they allowed noncitizen parents to vote, and Dominicans in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan helped mobilize 10,000 parents to register. Among those they installed: Guillermo Linares, who went on to become the first Dominican-born elected official in the United States, serving on the City Council and state Assembly.
“People were voting to make a difference in the education system,” said Maria Luna, a longtime community activist and a Democratic district leader, who said the benefits of the effort extended beyond the immigrant community. “The priority was to get better education and to build more schools for everybody. … It was really, really important for the benefit of children.”
New York put its mayor in charge of schools in 2002, shuttering the local boards and ending noncitizen voting with them.
Now, two decades later, a national movement to give voting rights to legal noncitizens has found its way to the country’s most populous city and, pending court battles, will soon give those immigrants the chance to shape local elections.
About 800,000 green card holders and others authorized to work in the country will become eligible to vote for mayor, City Council and other local offices. New York is by far the largest city to make such a move.The impact on local elections could potentially be far-reaching. The city’s electorate consists of just under 5 million active registered voters, meaning a major push to register immigrants and get them to the polls could reshape politics in New York. Voting blocs like the one that elected Linares could have the power to affect the outcome of not just City Council races but even the next mayoral race.