Chris Powell: Trump's charge about illegals voting raises a good question

Donald Trump's  assertion that he might have won the popular vote in the presidential election if so many illegal aliens had not voted against him is implausible if not ridiculous. But Connecticut is not in a good position to dismiss the complaint entirely.

For while extracting the information from the  Connecticut secretary of the state's office was nearly as difficult as pulling teeth, the (Manchester) Journal Inquirer reported the other day that Connecticut does not require any documentation of citizenship from people registering to vote. Only documentation of identity and residency are required, and it's up to municipal voter registrars to decide what sort of documentation they will accept, even whether to accept the identification cards that "sanctuary cities" like New Haven have been issuing to illegal immigrants to facilitate their violation of federal law.

New voters need only to attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens. For Connecticut considers it too onerous to require new voters to produce a birth certificate, and there are no checks of the eligibility of applicants and no audits of the eligibility of those already registered.

Of course it's unlikely that many illegal immigrants have registered to vote in Connecticut. But since the state's illegal immigrant population already is estimated to exceed 100,000 and keeps growing thanks to the "sanctuary cities," more illegal immigrants are likely to register over time. Since illegal immigrants have no reason to vote Republican, their registering is in the interest of the Democratic administrations of the "sanctuary cities" -- not just New Haven but also Hartford and New London and, probably, soon, Bridgeport as well.

Those cities always produce big Democratic pluralities and their administrations have great incentive not to be fastidious about the citizenship requirement for voters.

Further, influential forces on both the political left and right want to perpetuate illegal immigration. The left benefits from increasing the low-skilled, low-wage population, which becomes dependent on government. The right gets cheaper labor that depresses the working-class wage base and living standards.

The other day the Hartford Courant assisted this process with an editorial advising Hartford city government how it could distribute to illegal immigrants the sort of city identification cards issued in New Haven without maintaining records that could be pursued by federal immigration authorities, even when the feds are chasing criminals or terrorists. In issuing the cards, the Courant said, the city should not keep any records of the information submitted by illegal immigrants, nor any records of the issued cards themselves.

The card-issuing process then would be beyond evaluation, even by news organizations like the Courant. Anyone could come to Hartford, obtain city identification with forged documents, and slip into the community without a trace. As New Haven has done, Hartford thus would commandeer both national immigration and national security policy.

Even citizens seeking a change of identity for criminal and debt-evasion purposes could exploit this system.

All this destruction of standards is being cloaked in political correctness and humanity, as if it is the only alternative to Gestapo-style raids and deportations of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country.

But the issues are separate. Ending the facilitation of illegal immigration by local nullification of immigration law does not require inflicting cruelty on anyone, and while the nullifiers complain that the immigration system is "broken," they are the ones breaking it.

If the country won't enforce any standards in voting and immigration, eventually it won't be a country anymore.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn., and an essayist on cultural and political issues.