Where does my leading zeroes go?

I am reading in numbers from a comma seperated textfiles, where some numbers are on the form 000000084. These files are added to a messageclass, and then put in a SQLite database. The problem I have is that SQLite saves these 000000084 as 84, even though I create the table column as a string.

Inputfile

something,000000018,213123
somethingelse,000000025,213123

Creation of database:

def createDatabase(databasepath):
    con = lite.connect(databasepath)
    with con:
        cur = con.cursor()
        cur.execute("CREATE TABLE staticMessage(userid string)")

Message class:

class StaticMessage:  
    def __init__ (self, userid):
        self.userid    = userid  

Extracting message from file:

def extractStaticMessages(filepath):
    global staticMessage
    staticMessage = []
    lengths = []
    f = open(filepath, 'r')
    for line in f:
        newline = line.split(",")
        message = StaticMessage(newline[0])
        staticMessage.append(message)

Writing message to database:

def writeStaticToDatabase(databasepath):
    con = lite.connect(databasepath)
    con.isolation_level = None
    with con:
       cur = con.cursor()  
       cur.execute('BEGIN TRANSACTION')  
       for i in range(0, len(staticMessage)):
           cur.execute("INSERT INTO staticMessage(userid) VALUES(?)", 
            (staticMessage[i].userid)
       cur.execute('COMMIT')

When I then query my database with f.ex:

select userid from staticMessage where userid='000000084'

I get 84

This is a major annoyance for me, because I want to query my database to get the number of userids less than nine digits.

TL/DR: where does my leading zeros go when inserting into SQLite?