Aug
31
Illegal Immigrants Should NOT Be Counted in Census
When President Trump announced earlier this month that he wanted the Census Bureau to conduct a new, national census that would not include illegal immigrants, there was a bit of an uproar — mostly on the political Left. But, why is the President pushing for this (again)? And why is the Left so worked up? Mike Gonzalez, a Senior Fellow in the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation, wrote a piece on the matter. Here is an excerpt:
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President Donald Trump is correct in seeking to exclude illegal immigrants from being counted in the census.
Census numbers determine the apportionment of congressional seats and spending. The illegal immigrant population should not be here in the first place, so it should have zero effect on seats or spending.
But Trump must go further and finally fix the census, which the Left has used for years to thwart the assimilation needed to handle the high number of foreign-born residents. There are more than 50 million such residents in the United States, accounting for 15.6% of the population, handily beating the record of 14.8% set in 1890.
Unbeknownst to most people, the administration has already done a great deal of good to stop the census from balkanizing the country by quietly shuttering the Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations in February. Now it must follow through and eliminate racial and ethnic categories such as Hispanic and Asian American.
Make no mistake: These categories exist to give the Left the same thing illegal immigrants should not receive; namely, funding and political power.
These reforms would return the census to its original, neutral purpose as intended by the Founding Fathers.
Not counting illegal immigrants would help not just apportionment, but also redistricting, which is very different and has been very much in the news lately. Counting illegal immigrants dilutes the voting power of citizens. Think of two districts with equal populations—the one with more illegal residents has more power than the other. Counting illegal immigrants also gives blue electoral districts an unfair advantage….
The last time Trump tried to get the census to count only citizens in 2019, the Supreme Court blocked him. It called the administration’s argument that the data would produce better voting rights enforcement pretextual and charged that the administration violated the Administrative Procedures Act. But the court left the door open to trying again in the future, provided that the administration could give better reasoning. The administration just needs to get better lawyers and make its case, which is solid.
The same is true for eliminating the racial categories. The race or ethnicity of a citizen should also have zero effect on how many congressional seats, and, therefore, electoral votes, or federal spending a state receives.
Most people don’t know it, but many of these categories were set up by leftist activists in the 1970s to balkanize America, instill grievances into the members of the new categories, and thus seed sufficient animus against the U.S. to transform the republic substantially.
The Left sought the end of assimilation and nearly achieved it….
As I put it myself in my 2020 book, The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free: “The doleful role of the Census Bureau’s national advisory committees (NACs) is the establishment of identity politics.”
“Eliminating the NAC,” I wrote, “is an important step toward finally ridding society of identity politics.”
The Trump administration quietly did just that on Feb. 28, when the Census Bureau announced that “the Secretary of Commerce has determined that the purposes for which the National Advisory Committee was established have been fulfilled, and the committee has been terminated.”
This caused nary a stir on the Right, but the Left hollered….
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Gonzalez provides additional information, of course, so you should read his whole article.
There is also the question of whether or not the President can even order such a census. Mike Schneider addressed this at APNews:
“It would be extremely difficult to conduct a mid-decade census, if not impossible, according to experts.
Any changes in conducting a U.S. census would require alterations to the Census Act and approval from Congress, which has oversight responsibilities, and there likely would be a fierce fight.
The federal law governing the census permits a mid-decade head count for things like distributing federal funding, but it can’t be used for apportionment or redistricting and must be done in a year ending in 5. Additionally, the 14th Amendment says that ‘the whole number of persons in each state’ are to be counted for the numbers used for apportionment, and the Census Bureau has interpreted that to mean anybody residing in the United States regardless of legal status. Federal courts have repeatedly supported that interpretation, though the Supreme Court has blocked recent efforts to change that on procedural rather than legal grounds….
Then there is the question of logistics. The once-a-decade census is the biggest non-military undertaking by the federal government, utilizing a temporary workforce of hundreds of thousands of census takers. It can take as much as 10 years of planning.”
So, while I am wholeheartedly behind the reasoning for wanting an official census that excludes undocumented (and falsely documented) immigrants, it’s not going to happen real soon. There are too many legal and logistical issues to work through first, and that looks to be years away — assuming, of course, that Congress is sufficiently on board and the Supreme Court accepts the administration’s arguments. Not impossible, but it’s certainly not gonna happen this year.
