They cannot vote, and effectively none do. They fund the government at $96.7 billion a year and get no say in it — which is the exact grievance this country was founded on.

Voting in a federal election as a noncitizen is already a federal crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1015 and 18 U.S.C. § 611. It also ends any immigration case: it makes a person deportable and permanently inadmissible, and it disqualifies them from ever naturalizing. The penalty for one vote is losing the country. Nobody trades their life here for a single ballot.

So the question is only whether it happens anyway, and it is one of the most audited questions in American politics. The Brennan Center surveyed officials who oversaw 23.5 million votes in the 2016 election, deliberately concentrating on the jurisdictions with the largest noncitizen populations. They found 30 suspected incidents — 0.0001 percent. Forty of the 42 jurisdictions reported none at all.

State audits keep landing in the same place. Georgia's Republican Secretary of State audited all 8.2 million registered voters and found 20 noncitizens on the roll — one in 400,000 — of whom only nine had ever cast a ballot. Ohio's audit referred 138. Iowa spent $250,000 investigating and charged 10. These are rounding errors in elections decided by millions.

The real finding is the other one. Undocumented immigrants pay $96.7 billion a year in federal, state and local taxes, including into Social Security and Medicare they are barred from collecting. They fund the schools, the roads and the sheriff's department, and they cannot vote for a single official who decides how any of it is spent, or who decides whether their family is taken. Taxation without representation is not a metaphor here. It is the arrangement.