While many critics skewer President Obama’s recent amnesty-granting executive action, D.C.’s municipal lawmakers have their own plans for the next battle on the immigration-citizenship front. Invoking considerations of fairness and justice against “anti-immigrant hysteria,” D.C. council member David Grosso (I-At-Large) and several fellow councilmembers on Tuesday introduced the Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2015, a bill to grant non-American citizens residing in the D.C.-area the ability to vote in municipal elections.

In keeping with similar initiatives in 2013 and 2004, the bill would give suffrage to non-citizen D.C. residents who “have permanent residency status.” Grosso cited U.S. Census Bureau figures from 2012 approximating that over 90 percent of the 53,975 foreign-born, non-naturalized U.S. citizens in the District are 18 years of age or older, to weight down with seriousness his pronouncement that “these are taxpayers who should have the opportunity to have their voices heard in local elections.”