Federal law enforcement has arrested an illegal immigrant in New Jersey and charged him with illegally voting in the 2022 federal midterm election, according to a recent report in The Daily Caller. The incident is neither surprising nor unique, but it does illustrate several important points about the immigration and election integrity debates.

The alleged details of the latest case are as follows. Marian Charitun is a 62-year-old Slovakian national. Charitun registered to vote in New Jersey. To do so, he falsely stated under penalty of perjury that he was a U.S. citizen. He then subsequently voted in the 2022 federal midterm election. Charitun subsequently applied for U.S. citizenship. To do so, he falsely stated under penalty of perjury that he had never voted in a U.S. election. However, federal officials then discovered his prior voting history, and his citizenship application was denied.

Let’s address the simplest point first. When Americans hear the term “illegal immigrant,” their mental image is not a male nearing retirement age from a developed European nation. The common image is that of young, Hispanic (or Haitian) families fleeing poverty and war. In fairness, such immigrants are more common. When this stereotype is filtered through the matrix of critical race theory, it misleads the Left to oppose all enforcement of immigration laws. Charitun illustrates that the class known as “illegal immigrants” draws from all ages, ethnicities, and continents. The conclusion is: immigration laws are not inherently racist.

With that basic observation out of the way, we proceed to another principle almost too obvious to mention. As Charitun’s case allegedly illustrates, some people are willing to lie on official forms. This should be obvious. Marking false but unflagged answers on a citizenship application of voter application (or other official forms, such as a gun purchase application) carry immediate, known benefits, accompanied by only a conditional risk. This creates clear incentives for some unscrupulous individuals to try and cheat the system. If it were not so, then why has Congress deemed it necessary to attach perjury penalties to such lies?

Yet this obvious point is too often ignored. Perhaps it strikes imprecise thinkers as offensive to an entire class of people, or perhaps the more calculating deliberately overlook it for partisan gain. Certainly some people would naturally recoil from affirming an untruth, while others would be deterred by fear of punishment (Romans 13:3). But some non-zero number of those with hardened consciences and no fear of either the government or God will readily lie on an official application, if it means an advantage to themselves.

If this principle is once established, we should not be surprised to find illegal immigrants among the category of those who are willing to lie on a government form. By definition, illegal immigrants have already broken U.S. federal law. Some portion of them has broken the law knowingly and would do so again. And, if illegal immigrants remain in the country, then they have escaped consequences for their lawbreaking. This could induce them to believe they will escape the consequence for other illegal acts, such as lying on a government form. Again, this will not be true for every illegal immigrant, but we would be naïve to believe it is true for none of them.

The fact is that the Trump administration has already caught a number of foreign nationals — including other illegal immigrants — who have voted in U.S. elections. On March 9 of this year, the Department of Homeland Security announced the arrest of Mahady Sacko, an illegal immigrant from Mauritania who had voted in federal elections in the swing state of Pennsylvania no fewer than seven times since 2008. Sacko lost his final appeal against a deportation order in 2002 but somehow was never deported.

On May 19, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest of Sunny Manhertz, a Canadian national and lawful permanent resident who nevertheless voted in the last four presidential elections. To register to vote in Massachusetts, Manhertz claimed that he was a U.S. citizen.

On June 22, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that three foreign nationals in Florida had pled guilty to illegally voting in federal elections. Moises Lima Junior is a Brazilian national and lawful permanent resident. Gordon Louis is a Haitian national and also a convicted felon, which would have disqualified him from voting even as a citizen (the DOJ did not specify Louis’s immigration status). Roberto Figueredo is a Cuban national and also a convicted felon, whose lawful permanent resident status was revoked (likely due to the felony conviction) before he falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen while registering to vote in 2020.

As if it were necessary, these examples merely serve to drive home the point that some people (specifically, noncitizens) are going to lie on official forms (specifically, voter registration applications). And while the documentary evidence sometimes enables government investigators to catch these fraudulent voters in their lie, sometimes their lie goes undetected for multiple elections.

This presents a threat to the integrity of American elections. American elections are based on the principle of “one person, one vote,” with “person” here referring specifically to “citizens.” If noncitizens vote in elections, it dilutes the votes of citizens, thus undermining their voting rights. Elections are sometimes decided by one vote, or a handful of votes. Under the current porous rules, undetected illegal voters could make up the margin of victory in extremely close elections.

A certain brand of globalist would object that voting should be open to all residents, but that system would only work if it applied equally around the world. Americans living abroad cannot even vote in a place like Germany or Canada, much less Mauritania or China. So what justice is there in extending unrequited reciprocity to foreigners by allowing them to vote in the United States?

However, the challenge posed to election integrity is not insurmountable. All that is required is some form of verification of the self-reported citizenship status of voter applicants. There are multiple policy safeguards that could prevent this type of voter fraud. For instance, state voter rolls could be crosschecked against federal citizenship and immigration data. Alternatively, voter applicants could be required to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote (the idea behind the SAVE America Act).

Yet partisans on the American Left vehemently oppose all forms of identity verification that would weed out voting noncitizens. They falsely claim that these laws are designed to restrict legitimate citizens from voting, as citizens are incapable of obtaining documentary proof of their citizenship. Rather, the laws would merely catch those who are willing to blatantly lie on their voter application form.

The opposition to such commonsense solutions to an obvious problem suggests a partisan or ideological motive at play. Either immigration opponents oppose policies that would catch noncitizens who try to vote illegally because they hope those noncitizens will vote for their preferred candidates, or they deeply believe that American elections should be no longer for Americans only, but elections for the whole world.