California Gives Expanded Rights to Noncitizens

Honored to have been quoted on the front page of the NYT, above the fold:

LOS ANGELES — California is challenging the historic status of American citizenship with measures to permit noncitizens to sit on juries and monitor polls for elections in which they cannot vote and to open the practice of law even to those here illegally. It is the leading edge of a national trend that includes granting drivers’ licenses and in-state tuition to illegal immigrants in some states and that suggests legal residency could evolve into an appealing option should immigration legislation fail to produce a path to citizenship.

With 3.5 million noncitizens who are legal permanent residents in California, some view the changes as an acknowledgment of who is living here and the need to require some public service of them. But the new laws raise profound questions about which rights and responsibilities rightly belong to citizens over residents.

“What is more basic to our society than being able to judge your fellow citizens?” asked Jessica A. Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School, referring to jury service. “We’re absolutely going to the bedrock of things here and stretching what we used to think of as limits.”

Dear New Residents of L.A.: Please Participate

Welcome to the city of traffic jams, plastic people, air pollution and drive-thru cafes. What's not to love? In the words of Woody Allen's "Annie Hall," "I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light."

But Los Angeles is more than Hollywood and a perceived lack of substance. It is a city on the edge, literally. As Mike Davis wrote in Ecology of Fear, "The entire world seems to be rooting for Los Angeles to slide into the Pacific or be swallowed by the San Andreas fault." To live in Los Angeles is to be somewhere and someplace, acutely aware of fragility.

More than a city forever between natural disasters, Los Angeles has been described as a place with no center. Both mentally and physically this is true. We have no place where we all coalesce. Los Angeles is indeed the antithesis of the community with a town square.

Finish reading this article on KCET.org.