On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to prevent illegal immigrants from being counted for the purposes of re-drawing congressional districts after the 2020 census.
The order, “Ensuring American Citizens Receive Proper Representation in Congress” comes after the Supreme Court last year blocked a citizenship question from being included in the Census and sent the question back to lower courts, claiming that the administration’s reasoning for the question was insufficient.
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.”
According to an analysis from Unbiased America, Blue States with large illegal alien populations like California are benefiting massively in terms of representation due to their non-citizens.
Decades ago, the relatively small number of unauthorized residents in the U.S. meant that including them in the Census did not materially change the number of representatives each state was allocated. But today there are between 12 and 14 million people living here illegally, and the number is rising.
As a result, states with large numbers of undocumented immigrants gain the advantage of additional representation in Congress. Based on the 2010 Census, the following states gained representatives because of the number of people illegally there:
- California: +6 representatives (11.3% of its current representatives)
- Florida: +1 representative (4.0%)
- New York: +1 representative (3.4%)
- Texas: +1 representative (3.1%)
Because the House of Representatives is currently fixed by law at 435 members, states that have fewer illegal aliens and non-citizens lose representatives as a result. The following states have fewer representatives than they would if undocumented immigrants were not counted in the calculation:
- Mississippi: -1 representative (25.0% of its current representatives)
- Oklahoma: -1 representative (20.0%)
- Kentucky: -1 representative (16.7%)
- South Carolina: -1 representative (16.7%)
- Wisconsin: -1 representative (12.5%)
- Indiana: -1 representative (11.1%)
- Michigan: -1 representative (6.7%)
- Ohio: -1 representative (5.6%)
- Pennsylvania: -1 representative (5.3%)
The Census is also used to allocate federal funds, and states with more illegal immigrants thus receive more from the federal government at the expense of those with smaller illegal alien populations.
