>I'm sorry, but personally I do not feel that green card holders should be allowed to vote. I feel personally that that benefit should be afforded to U.S. citizens only. In what other country are non-citizens allowed to vote? I'm sure there must be some but that does not make it right. I realize that you pay taxes on your income but you also reap the benefits and services that paying those taxes provide (all except the right to vote). I do not think that anyone should be able to come to the U.S., work here and reap the benefits of being in the U.S. for free. U.S. citizens do not get that advantage. We pay too much in taxes ourselves as it is and will for as long as we earn income.

I'm not complaining about not being entitled to vote here - I'm not a citizen. I'm more **ed off at my own country for not allowing me to vote from here.

As for the complaint about representation - the point is that if a citizen, or a group thereof, have something to say about any law, they have a mechanism to do something about it. We don't, simply because there's absolutely nobody who's representing foreigners in this country. If there were only a few of us, no problem. But as you mentioned, there's a lot of chicken handlers out there. And yet any laws which concern this particular group of people are in the hands of a completely different group of people, with entirely different interests.

I accept this as a reality; this is something that happens in every country with a sufficient number of foreign workers (as it was the case in most of the West European countries during most of the XX century, and probably still is). So I'm taking the only way I think is fair: make the citizens aware of the situation of non-citizens, and hope it will cause some change in the future.

And, BTW, we're paying the same taxes - so "advantage" is the same. It comes from everybody's taxes, regardless of the citizenship status. OK, maybe I'm not paying property taxes because I didn't have the time to acquire any, but then INS has already made a substantial amount on me, so we're about equal there. And some of the benefits actually don't extend to foreigners - like chances to get a scholarship, for instance.