Why Were Immigrant Voting Rights Eliminated?

Opposition to immigrant voting arose during periods of political conflict, nativism and increased immigration. During the War of 1812, when the White House was sacked and burnt, fear of “foreign-enemies” grew and led to the repeal of immigrant voting in several states. During the 1850s when large numbers of Irish, Germans and Chinese came to the U.S., immigrant voting became contested and repealed by nativists. Immigrant voting was opposed by southern states because immigrants were largely opposed to slavery.

Yet, as the U.S. expanded westward and as the economy grew, the need for labor spurred an increase in immigration and an expansion of immigrant voting rights. Immigrant voting was most widely practiced in the 1870s and 1880s. State courts and the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed immigrant voting rights (e.g., Minor vs. Happersett, 1875).

But during the 1890s and early 1900s, when large numbers of newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe came to the U.S. and political conflict grew, immigrants and immigrant voting rights became the objects of attacks by nativists, sparking states to repeal immigrant voting as well as steep and racist limits on immigration. Rising xenophobia reached a feverish pitch during WWI, leading to an end of immigrant voting and the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the National Origins Act (1924) that drastically reduce immigration from non-Western European countries. This was also a time when other more familiar voting restrictions were enacted, including poll taxes, literacy tests, restrictive residency requirements, burdensome voter registration procedures, and grandfather clauses – all of which disenfranchised millions of poor, working class, people of color that limited more democratic politics and policy for decades.