reflecting on my voting record and life as a migrant
For entirely selfish reasons, i really wish the US election season was limited, like it is in pretty much every other democracy. The reason is that apparently no matter my intent beforehand, i still end up getting suckered into following the horse race, for nigh on TWO FUCKING YEARS out of every four. It's ridiculous. "She doesn't even go here!"
The thing is... I don't even go anywhere. And perhaps that's why i find myself so fascinated with following the machinations of democracy - the polling, the surveys, the policies, the analyses. It's so much time and energy (and - in the US - money) sunk into something that affects me but which i feel unable to influence.
I've written about this before, but... i am in my mid-40s and have barely placed a vote.
When i turned 18, i lived in Australia, where i was a migrant who held permanent residence due to my mother moving there while i was still a minor. The conservative Liberal-National coalition was in power and it had a very poor track record with migrants, including fabricating a story that a sinking ship full of refugees had thrown their own children overboard in order to blackmail a nearby Navy vessel into giving them asylum. In the state where i lived, a populist politician started a new far-right party advocating for net zero immigration and an end to indigenous and multicultural programs. Can migrants vote in Australia? Yeah, nah.
When i was 21 i moved to the US on a visitor visa to be with a woman i had fallen in love with online. It was just after 9/11, prior to the big Homeland Security reorg. Back then visitors could get a California drivers' license and qualify for restricted health coverage under Medi-Cal. Bush Jr ran as a compassionate conservative with a migrant-friendly platform. I felt more accepted as a temporary resident in America than i ever did as a permanent resident in Australia. I got invited for jury duty and had to send it back checking the box "sorry, not a citizen". Can migrants vote in the US? Nope. Not then, not now.
When my 12 months (6 months + extension) ran out in America, i moved back to Australia and continued working and living there for several years as a permanent resident with still no right to vote. Same conservative government was in power as before, and they presided over increasingly violent race riots that targeted Middle Eastern migrants. I hid in my bubble and hung out with the gays. No politics, just parties.
One day i met a woman from Canada, we fell in love, and at 29 i moved to the Great White North to build a life with her. It took almost a year before i was eligible to work, even as the spouse of a Canadian citizen. Eventually i gained permanent residence and continued working there until the marriage fell apart around 4 years in. During that time i got to see Canadians kick out the Conservatives (who seemed pretty nice compared to Australia's racist bunch) and usher in the current centrist administration. Can migrants vote in Canada? No, eh.
But by age 34 i was finally living in a country where i was "sort of" a citizen. I was not a citizen of Germany, but i was a citizen of the UK and thus the EU, which is what allowed me to live and work freely in Germany without applying for any kind of visa or work permit. For the first time in my adult life, i was not classified as an immigrant, although still considered a migrant. Can migrants vote in Germany? Hmm, jein. Sort of.
There was an EU election in 2014 that i would have qualified to vote in, if i had known i was eligible. I mean, i think i knew that i was eligible in theory, but i had just arrived in Germany and was excited by all the music and my new job and i just didn't get it sorted. I guess i felt like young voters do when they miss the first election of their lives because they were at a party or they didn't know how to get registered or whatever. My friends group was appalled because AfD (a then-new far-right party) won 7 seats on an anti-migrant, Euroskeptic platform. Little did we know it'd go on to become a major force in German politics.
2016.
Brexit.
Fuck Brexit.
When people say "well voting doesn't matter that much, just wait a few years and you'll get another chance", they clearly missed fucking Brexit, the most consequential vote of my entire life. I, with my British birthright, was barred from voting because i had lived outside the UK for too long, and then a bunch of fuckwits chose to steal away that very birthright that was allowing me to live as a legal citizen of the EU. Utterly shameful. I will never forgive and never forget. I literally had my citizenship - and my voting rights - torn away from me. Fuck them all. Fuck xenophobia.
After Brexit i was still eligible to vote in one election in 2016. So i did. The first election of my life, at 36 years old. It was the local Berlin council elections, where migrants were eligible to vote in only one of the three races. I voted for the Eco-Left Anti-Racist List, a radical left/green anarchist group that ended up with 1000 votes across the whole city, but goddamnit one of those was my fucking vote. The first of my life. I wasn't going to waste it on a mainstream party that would gladly throw migrants under the bus to pander to the quarter million xenophobic yahoos who ended up voting AfD anyway. First vote of my life as a European, last vote of my life as a European. No regrets.
And then, you know, Trump happened.
I left Europe in despair. Moved to China. Why bother with democracy when everyone's a crypto-fascist anyway? COVID. Canada. Cycle tour. Taiwan. You know the rest.
Somewhere along the way, i became a Canadian citizen. I wanted to become a Canadian citizen because living in Toronto - a city with over 50% foreign-born residents - i felt accepted, the same way i did living in California all those years prior, before America took its embarrassing xenophobic turn. And, having broken the seal on my life as an active, voting member of a democracy, i started to pay closer attention to opportunities where my voice could be heard.
Well, i tried. I tried and failed to vote after moving to BC in 2020, because even when you are a Canadian citizen you are not allowed to vote in BC provincial elections until you have lived there for 6 months straight. Then i tried again when Trudeau called a snap election in 2021. I was already on a bicycle heading out of Canada by this point, but i submitted an out-of-province ballot from the place i was traveling through. I voted for the NDP (left-wing) representative in the rural town i had lived during COVID, but of course the Conservatives kept the seat.
When i arrived back at my friend's house after cycling around the Americas, i found that i had acquired Ontario residency due to changing my address with the tax office, just in time to cast a vote in the 2022 provincial election. I felt a bit weird voting for a candidate in a town i was only going to spend a few weeks in before jetting off to Taiwan, but i went anyway and cast a vote for the NDP candidate in a record-breakingly low turnout election. She won, so i guess that makes me 1 for 3 in favorable election outcomes.
You might ask, but amw, why did you not vote in the 2019 Canadian federal election? Well... I did not live in Canada. And it was only in 2019 that the Supreme Court ruled that Canadians who live overseas for longer than 5 years are eligible to vote in federal elections, something i feel like i probably read about but perhaps didn't register while my mom was dying of cancer and shit started to hit the fan in Hong Kong.
Canada does not have dedicated representation for overseas voters, so you still need to pick a riding, somehow. The only connection i have is to Windsor, since that's where my best friend lives and that's where my mail goes. Should i vote in the next election to try to keep the urban core - directly across the river from downtown Detroit - orange, even while "Canadians for Trump" and other Freedom Convoy jackasses try to hijack the region's politics? I guess, for my friend, i should do it. But also i do feel awkward about voting somewhere that i do not live. Doesn't that make me just as bad as the Brexit shitheads who didn't live in continental Europe but voted to take away the rights of the millions of Brits who did? Doesn't it make me just as bad as every xenophobic twat who votes to take away the rights of migrants?
Democracy is complicated.
And, lest i buried the lede, it's fucking pathetic that i have lived pretty much my entire life as a generally law-abiding, productive, tax-paying member of society... and not once - not even once in over 25 years as a voting age adult - have i been able to vote for the leaders of the country in which i live. It's undemocratic. This is what it means to be a second-class citizen. This is why anti-migrant rhetoric is so absurd. The people folks are so afraid of, the people folks are targeting their hatred toward, are the people with the least power in the country! People who do not even have the right to political representation! And y'all think we are the ones who are somehow getting special treatment? Give me a break. Migrants - whether they chose that path for themselves or not - are starting with a penalty right out of the gate. They - we - deserve empathy and understanding, not fear and loathing.
But here i am. Fascinated by everyone else's democratic process, perhaps because i am so isolated from participation in my own.
Well, i'm fascinated but also often dismayed, and - in the case of the US - fucking exhausted. And now we need to put up with this supreme fucking asshat monopolizing the media's attention for another 4 years. Unlike Bush 2004, i can find no positives. Well, one positive. Unlike 2016, i am not a quivering wreck. I'm too jaded these days to be anything more than disappointed. Fuck Trump. Now i am going to watch some Star Trek.
The thing is... I don't even go anywhere. And perhaps that's why i find myself so fascinated with following the machinations of democracy - the polling, the surveys, the policies, the analyses. It's so much time and energy (and - in the US - money) sunk into something that affects me but which i feel unable to influence.
I've written about this before, but... i am in my mid-40s and have barely placed a vote.
When i turned 18, i lived in Australia, where i was a migrant who held permanent residence due to my mother moving there while i was still a minor. The conservative Liberal-National coalition was in power and it had a very poor track record with migrants, including fabricating a story that a sinking ship full of refugees had thrown their own children overboard in order to blackmail a nearby Navy vessel into giving them asylum. In the state where i lived, a populist politician started a new far-right party advocating for net zero immigration and an end to indigenous and multicultural programs. Can migrants vote in Australia? Yeah, nah.
When i was 21 i moved to the US on a visitor visa to be with a woman i had fallen in love with online. It was just after 9/11, prior to the big Homeland Security reorg. Back then visitors could get a California drivers' license and qualify for restricted health coverage under Medi-Cal. Bush Jr ran as a compassionate conservative with a migrant-friendly platform. I felt more accepted as a temporary resident in America than i ever did as a permanent resident in Australia. I got invited for jury duty and had to send it back checking the box "sorry, not a citizen". Can migrants vote in the US? Nope. Not then, not now.
When my 12 months (6 months + extension) ran out in America, i moved back to Australia and continued working and living there for several years as a permanent resident with still no right to vote. Same conservative government was in power as before, and they presided over increasingly violent race riots that targeted Middle Eastern migrants. I hid in my bubble and hung out with the gays. No politics, just parties.
One day i met a woman from Canada, we fell in love, and at 29 i moved to the Great White North to build a life with her. It took almost a year before i was eligible to work, even as the spouse of a Canadian citizen. Eventually i gained permanent residence and continued working there until the marriage fell apart around 4 years in. During that time i got to see Canadians kick out the Conservatives (who seemed pretty nice compared to Australia's racist bunch) and usher in the current centrist administration. Can migrants vote in Canada? No, eh.
But by age 34 i was finally living in a country where i was "sort of" a citizen. I was not a citizen of Germany, but i was a citizen of the UK and thus the EU, which is what allowed me to live and work freely in Germany without applying for any kind of visa or work permit. For the first time in my adult life, i was not classified as an immigrant, although still considered a migrant. Can migrants vote in Germany? Hmm, jein. Sort of.
There was an EU election in 2014 that i would have qualified to vote in, if i had known i was eligible. I mean, i think i knew that i was eligible in theory, but i had just arrived in Germany and was excited by all the music and my new job and i just didn't get it sorted. I guess i felt like young voters do when they miss the first election of their lives because they were at a party or they didn't know how to get registered or whatever. My friends group was appalled because AfD (a then-new far-right party) won 7 seats on an anti-migrant, Euroskeptic platform. Little did we know it'd go on to become a major force in German politics.
2016.
Brexit.
Fuck Brexit.
When people say "well voting doesn't matter that much, just wait a few years and you'll get another chance", they clearly missed fucking Brexit, the most consequential vote of my entire life. I, with my British birthright, was barred from voting because i had lived outside the UK for too long, and then a bunch of fuckwits chose to steal away that very birthright that was allowing me to live as a legal citizen of the EU. Utterly shameful. I will never forgive and never forget. I literally had my citizenship - and my voting rights - torn away from me. Fuck them all. Fuck xenophobia.
After Brexit i was still eligible to vote in one election in 2016. So i did. The first election of my life, at 36 years old. It was the local Berlin council elections, where migrants were eligible to vote in only one of the three races. I voted for the Eco-Left Anti-Racist List, a radical left/green anarchist group that ended up with 1000 votes across the whole city, but goddamnit one of those was my fucking vote. The first of my life. I wasn't going to waste it on a mainstream party that would gladly throw migrants under the bus to pander to the quarter million xenophobic yahoos who ended up voting AfD anyway. First vote of my life as a European, last vote of my life as a European. No regrets.
And then, you know, Trump happened.
I left Europe in despair. Moved to China. Why bother with democracy when everyone's a crypto-fascist anyway? COVID. Canada. Cycle tour. Taiwan. You know the rest.
Somewhere along the way, i became a Canadian citizen. I wanted to become a Canadian citizen because living in Toronto - a city with over 50% foreign-born residents - i felt accepted, the same way i did living in California all those years prior, before America took its embarrassing xenophobic turn. And, having broken the seal on my life as an active, voting member of a democracy, i started to pay closer attention to opportunities where my voice could be heard.
Well, i tried. I tried and failed to vote after moving to BC in 2020, because even when you are a Canadian citizen you are not allowed to vote in BC provincial elections until you have lived there for 6 months straight. Then i tried again when Trudeau called a snap election in 2021. I was already on a bicycle heading out of Canada by this point, but i submitted an out-of-province ballot from the place i was traveling through. I voted for the NDP (left-wing) representative in the rural town i had lived during COVID, but of course the Conservatives kept the seat.
When i arrived back at my friend's house after cycling around the Americas, i found that i had acquired Ontario residency due to changing my address with the tax office, just in time to cast a vote in the 2022 provincial election. I felt a bit weird voting for a candidate in a town i was only going to spend a few weeks in before jetting off to Taiwan, but i went anyway and cast a vote for the NDP candidate in a record-breakingly low turnout election. She won, so i guess that makes me 1 for 3 in favorable election outcomes.
You might ask, but amw, why did you not vote in the 2019 Canadian federal election? Well... I did not live in Canada. And it was only in 2019 that the Supreme Court ruled that Canadians who live overseas for longer than 5 years are eligible to vote in federal elections, something i feel like i probably read about but perhaps didn't register while my mom was dying of cancer and shit started to hit the fan in Hong Kong.
Canada does not have dedicated representation for overseas voters, so you still need to pick a riding, somehow. The only connection i have is to Windsor, since that's where my best friend lives and that's where my mail goes. Should i vote in the next election to try to keep the urban core - directly across the river from downtown Detroit - orange, even while "Canadians for Trump" and other Freedom Convoy jackasses try to hijack the region's politics? I guess, for my friend, i should do it. But also i do feel awkward about voting somewhere that i do not live. Doesn't that make me just as bad as the Brexit shitheads who didn't live in continental Europe but voted to take away the rights of the millions of Brits who did? Doesn't it make me just as bad as every xenophobic twat who votes to take away the rights of migrants?
Democracy is complicated.
And, lest i buried the lede, it's fucking pathetic that i have lived pretty much my entire life as a generally law-abiding, productive, tax-paying member of society... and not once - not even once in over 25 years as a voting age adult - have i been able to vote for the leaders of the country in which i live. It's undemocratic. This is what it means to be a second-class citizen. This is why anti-migrant rhetoric is so absurd. The people folks are so afraid of, the people folks are targeting their hatred toward, are the people with the least power in the country! People who do not even have the right to political representation! And y'all think we are the ones who are somehow getting special treatment? Give me a break. Migrants - whether they chose that path for themselves or not - are starting with a penalty right out of the gate. They - we - deserve empathy and understanding, not fear and loathing.
But here i am. Fascinated by everyone else's democratic process, perhaps because i am so isolated from participation in my own.
Well, i'm fascinated but also often dismayed, and - in the case of the US - fucking exhausted. And now we need to put up with this supreme fucking asshat monopolizing the media's attention for another 4 years. Unlike Bush 2004, i can find no positives. Well, one positive. Unlike 2016, i am not a quivering wreck. I'm too jaded these days to be anything more than disappointed. Fuck Trump. Now i am going to watch some Star Trek.