PERSPECTIVE ON CITIZENSHIP : Los Angeles: City of a Million Non-Participants : Disenfranchisment is a two-way burden; all would benefit if the federal government promoted citizenship.

One out of three adult residents of the city of Los Angeles--close to 1 million men and women--was unable to vote in Tuesday’s municipal elections. It’s not that they didn’t care about who would become the city’s chief executive after Mayor Bradley’s reign of 20 years. They were on the sidelines simply because they are not U.S. citizens.

Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that all these people are undocumented immigrants from Mexico, consider the reality. Non-citizens encompass a complex variety of legal statuses. There are legal permanent residents, refugees, people granted asylum, amnesty applicants who have received legal permanent resident status, Central Americans and others who have received temporary protected status and, obviously, undocumented immigrants from every country in the world. In the nation as a whole, there are 10 million adults who fall into one of these categories. One out of 10 of these individuals lives within Los Angeles city limits.

What does this mean to the city? The effects are enormous. Non-citizenship results in the disenfranchisement of one-third of the city’s population from its political institutions--not only at the local level, but at the state and federal levels as well. Worse yet, disenfranchisement is a two-way street. Community members who can’t participate can be easily ignored by their elected representatives. After all, the cement of accountability, the right to “vote the rascals out,” is missing. Thus, the gap between the elected and their constituents looms large. Evidence of this? Consider the anti-immigrant rhetoric heard in this year’s campaign for mayor. Even congressional candidates in districts with large immigrant populations have been known to engage in shameless immigrant-bashing among their voting constituencies.

Non-citizenship has other consequences. Jury rolls in Los Angeles are unrepresentative because jurors must be citizens; most jobs in the federal government (surprisingly, Southern California has thousands of such positions) are open only to citizens. Non-citizens also missed out on the boom in the aerospace job market of the ‘80s because U.S. citizenship is often required for working in defense-related industries. Non-citizenship excludes many Angelenos from Small Business Administration loan guarantees. Inheritances from spouses are taxable to non-citizens, but are tax free to U.S. citizens. Certain scholarships are open only to U.S. citizens.

American society has made justifiable distinctions between citizens of this country and non-citizens. We all accept this. However, what many of us fail to realize is that the restrictions of non-citizenship affect huge segments of the country. If put together in one state, our nation’s non-citizen residents would constitute the eighth largest state in the nation. And its largest city would be made up of our South-Central Los Angeles, Pico-Union, Koreatown and East L.A. neighborhoods.

What does it mean for American society if the largest city in the most populous state in the nation has a million non-citizen residents? Shouldn’t we be renewing the commitment to promoting U.S. citizenship that we made to European immigrants at the turn of this century?

At the local level, it’s unrealistic to expect significant resources to be shifted to this task. As we all know, California and the county and city of Los Angeles are reeling from budget deficits that are cutting back basic social services, decimating school budgets and reducing local government payrolls.

At the national level, it’s another story. The Clinton Administration has a unique opportunity in this regard. With new leadership in the Justice Department and within the Immigration and Naturalization Service, new policy initiatives can be undertaken that would promote and facilitate naturalization--the process that immigrants must complete to become U.S. citizens.

Let me give some specifics. In Southern California, the INS conducts naturalization examinations in one building serving a five-county area of 15 million people. Why not have examinations in the community, as the Chicago INS office does? Why should the INS not promote naturalization? Why is the “N” in INS given so little visibility and priority?

As a nation, we’ve taken pride in the political integration of the immigrant. We did this at the turn of the century. We need to do this again. Non-citizenship is affecting our basic political institutions, as Tuesday’s low turnout of voters demonstrate. Los Angeles can and should be the focal point of a renewed national effort to bring immigrants fully into American life.