No taxation without representation!

Green Card holders in Lexington pay taxes, own homes and businesses, and send their kids to public schools. But they can’t vote in local elections. A few municipalities, including New York City, San Francisco, and Montpelier, VT, have recently begun allowing non-citizen residents to vote for local positions like school board or city council. Why not Lexington? 

With the Town Meeting approaching, LexObserver contributor Lisa Guidetti spoke with Nathalie Huitema, a long-time Lexington resident who has been working to bring attention to this issue.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

LG: So tell us about your personal interest in voting rights for Green Card holders.

NH: I come from the Netherlands, so I’m a Dutch citizen. I moved to the US almost nine years ago. We lived in California for a while and moved to Lexington almost four years ago now. We were lucky, as a family, that we were able to get Green Cards immediately after touching American soil. 

Lexington is a really participatory town. During the pandemic, there was a lot of talk, of course, about the schools, and I was very interested in that, because I had three children in the school system — one in high school, one in middle school, one in elementary school. I was pretty invested in how everything with the pandemic would roll out and how decisions were made. 

And then there was an election — I think two seats on the School Committee were open around the end of the pandemic. I was getting ready to help campaign, I had signs in my yard — I’m doing the American thing here! Then somebody mentioned something about only American citizens being able to vote. And I thought, ‘What?’ I didn’t realize I wasn’t able to. I knew national elections were, of course, for American citizens, but I didn’t realize that I couldn’t vote for School Committee — as a resident, a taxpayer, and a mom of students!  

I was really disappointed. As a Dutch citizen, I’m used to having a right to vote and express my opinion. Shortly after, there was a referendum around gas leaf blowers. So I figured, okay, I’m very interested — it’s very loud in my neighborhood, everybody uses them, and even on a Saturday morning, it’s insanely loud everywhere. The sound is intense and it doesn’t seem healthy for the people using them. I wanted to express my opinion, to vote for or against, and I wasn’t able to do so.

That got me! I don’t like this. I felt like even though I’m not an American citizen, I’m a Lexington resident, I pay taxes here, I have my kids in the school system, I volunteered for the PTO — I was a lunch volunteer at school, now I’m volunteering with my therapy dog. I’m trying to build a business here. I shop locally. I try to do everything that I think to contribute to Lexington!

LG: You’re invested.  

NH: Yeah, I really want to make Lexington my home! That’s why I’m so passionate about this issue! I feel like Lexington is my home. You know, whenever I go somewhere, “Oh, we’re going back home.” 

LG: So tell me what you’ve been doing to address this. 

NH: I’m not alone anymore in my quest, I have formed a little group of people who feel the same way. Some from the Town Meeting members, even one person from the School Committee who is also a Town Meeting member. There’s a diverse group of people who have joined me. We’re in this together. 

What I’m doing now is trying to talk to people and see what they like about the idea or don’t like about the idea. See if I can get a sense of how people feel about this issue in Lexington before we would eventually, hopefully, take it for a vote in the Town Meeting.

LG: Is your first attempt to look at the School Committee and focus there? Because I believe other towns support the right for residents to choose School Committees — that specific example has hit a nerve with many people. Have you reached out to any other organizations working on this issue? 

NH: So far it’s been from the ground up. I’ve read about other towns that have been trying. 

Several cities in Massachusetts have tried and succeeded, Boston and Cambridge among them. They have succeeded in a sense — the majority of the town voted that Green Card holders should be able to vote. Unfortunately, due to how the politics in Massachusetts is set up, the town then needs to file a home rule petition and the governor needs to approve it. It’s still unclear, even if Lexington voted in favor, whether or not the governor would approve the decision. 

LG: Do you know how many Green Card holders live in Lexington? 

NH: There’s no tally, no statistics. The town also doesn’t know. So we’ve done some work on that, and what I found is that close to 30% of the residents of Lexington are foreign-born. I think the national average is 13%. Of the residents that are 18 and older, it’s around 23,000 residents, and 10% of those are non-US citizens. So that means around 10% (a little bit more) of people of voting age living in Lexington are foreign nationals. That’s around 2,500 people — quite a lot! I know Lexington has been struggling a bit with how many people come to vote in local elections. I might have a solution for that problem!

With Lexington’s history, I thought how great would it be for Lexington if we could be the first town able to actually take the the term “no taxation without representation” and make it reality. 

The Green Card holders feel part of Lexington, as I think they are. They really make Lexington the diverse, very vibrant community it is. But unfortunately, so far they are not represented.