Transcript Staff Writer
OKLAHOMA CITY -- Oklahoma lawmakers should take a page from history and change the state's voting laws to allow all of-age state residents -- no matter what their citizenship status -- the right to vote, an OSU professor said last week.
Dr. Bob Darcy, a political science professor at Oklahoma State University, said Oklahoma should revert back to its territorial-style voting laws. Under those laws, he said, all residents, regardless of their citizenship status, had the right to vote in state and local elections.
"When Oklahoma was a territory, its election laws gave residents -- no matter what their residency status was -- the right to vote," Darcy said. "That's the way it should be now."
Darcy, in Oklahoma City to participate in the state Political Science Association's annual convention, said Oklahoma's current voting laws disenfranchise a large number of the state's population.
"Across Oklahoma there are large pockets of people who cannot vote because their paperwork isn't in order. Yet, these same people have jobs, families, homes and are paying taxes here. That's wrong."
While Darcy acknowledged that many resident aliens living here are undocumented -- or illegal -- Oklahoma, he said, was a state developed by an "immigrant society."
"Our state was founded by immigrants," he said. "So, I find the current political rhetoric flying around right now a bit ironic. This state was settled by non-citizens from other places."
Today, he said, many state lawmakers are using undocumented aliens as their latest political weapon. "Undocumented aliens have been demagogued for the past two hundred years. It's nothing new. It's just the group that's currently in power reacting to the latest group of immigrants."
Darcy, a former president of the political science association, said the country's latest wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric has deep historic roots and should be seen in that pretext.
"From the late 1800s to the early 1900s the nation was ran by prosperous white, non-Catholic men. They were called WASPs -- white, Anglo Saxon Protestants," he said. "And the WASPs didn't want anyone new upsetting their operation."
At that time, Darcy said, the group campaigned against the country's new wave of immigrants -- the Irish, the Jews and the Asians.
"Now, most of those groups have been assimilated into this category known as 'white'," he said. "And now, this group is raising cain against Hispanic immigrants."
However, Darcy also believes the state's -- and the country's -- latest campaigns against immigrants will eventually die out as those immigrants, too, are absorbed into the "white" category.
"The Hispanics are here to stay," he said. "This campaign is a short term thing. It's just rhetoric from a few public officials who have nothing more to offer. It's like the No Nothing party of the 1800s. The core of their philosophy was anti-immigration."
Yet even though he believes the fiery immigration rhetoric will soften, some damage, he said, has been done.
"Just like before; you have residents who have lived their whole lives here, residents who experience it (the rhetoric) first hand. That's not pleasant for them, and is causes some damange. Hopefully, it will stop before that damange gets out of hand."
Instead of rhetoric, Darcy said, the best policy is openness. "Letting everyone vote worked 100 years ago, it would work today."
M. Scott Carter 366-3545 scarter@normantranscript.com
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