Thanks to how our Census works, America’s population total includes non-citizen legal residents and illegal immigrants too. While neither of those two groups can vote, they’re still included when it come to determining how much representatives and federal funding each state receives.
Since illegal aliens tend to reside in a select few states that have more “sanctuary” type policies, it’s Blue States that get their representation amplified at the expense of Red States. President Trump recently signed an executive order to prevent illegal immigrants from being counted for the purposes of re-drawing congressional districts after the 2020 census, and it’s one that everyone is on board with.
As Just The News reports:
Just 23% of U.S. voters say illegal immigrants should be included in population counts for determining representation in Congress. Seventy-percent (70%) disagree, according to a new Just the News Daily Poll with Scott Rasmussen.
The poll results come as California, Florida and Texas would each lose a House seat if President Trump succeeds in getting illegal immigrants removed from the 2020 U.S. census, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.
Rasmussen noted that the poll found opposition to including illegal immigrants comes from 72% of White voters, 67% of Black voters, and 57% of Hispanic voters. Opposition also comes from 88% of conservatives, 68% of moderates, and 51% of liberals.
A solid plurality (41%) of all voters believe all legal residents should be included (both citizens and others).
A Center for Immigration Studies report estimated that after the 2020 Census there will be 24 fewer seats in the House in states won by President Trump in 2016, corresponding to a loss of 24 electoral votes. To clarify since that particular report was misinterpreted, those are the cumulative effects of counting illegals as population, not the expected effects of the 2020 census specifically. California in particular has six more seats than they otherwise would if illegals weren’t counted in the Census ever.
It’s only in America that a citizenship question on the Census is considering remotely controversial (or perhaps it’s just the media pushing the narrative that it is).
President Thomas Jefferson first proposed a citizenship question in 1800, and one was added to the census in 1820 with a question that asked for the number of “foreigners not naturalized” in the household. Census forms including citizenship questions were common until 1950. On a global scale, as the Heritage Foundation notes “even the United Nations recommends that its member countries ask a citizenship question on their census surveys, and countries ranging from Australia to Germany to Indonesia all ask this question.”
