Now that President Trump has fulfilled his campaign promise to sign executive orders on his Inauguration Day to crack down on illegal immigration, the real battle over his immigration reform will take place in the courts.
While the ACLU and other anti-borders groups are busy filing lawsuits against the executive orders, a group of states have filed suit to achieve one of Trump’s goals: stopping the counting of people in the country illegally in the census for the purpose of apportionment in Congress.
Three days before Trump returned to the White House, Kansas, Louisiana, Ohio and West Virginia sued the Department of Commerce, seeking to change the census policy. While defenders of the policy make arguments that people here illegally live here and have the right to be counted, there is a more cynical and self-serving agenda at work.
Apportionment is the process in which each state is allotted a number of congressional districts and electoral votes based on its population as measured by the census. If the census includes people here illegally, as the 2020 census did, states with high numbers such as California end up getting extra congressional seats and electoral votes. States with low numbers end up losing congressional seats and electoral votes.
This is a shameless perversion of our democratic foundations, where only citizens and lawful permanent residents of our country are supposed to be counted toward their representation in Congress. It also creates a warped incentive for states to encourage people to come illegally to settle in their state for the consolidation of political power.
The Immigration Reform Law Institute, which is serving as counsel in the suit against the Commerce Department, has been deeply involved in this issue for years and makes a compelling case against the current policy. When a person – whether a voter or a nonvoter, such as a child – is counted in the census for apportionment, that person receives representation in our national government, including the House of Representatives.
But no one outside our national political community, considered in its widest sense, should be given representation in our national government. And people here illegally, as the Supreme Court and other federal courts have held, are neither part of the American people nor members of our national political community. It follows by simple logic that they should not be counted for apportionment purposes.
There is research showing how this policy gives people here illegally a significant influence in our nation’s voting and representation. A recent study found that almost 1 in 10 New Jersey residents are people who came to America illegally.
This means that nearly 10% of New Jersey’s electoral college votes and 10% of its House representation after 2030 could be the result of illegal immigration, and New Jersey is not even a border state. Imagine the impact illegal immigration may have on the census results in states like California, Arizona or Texas.
According to a 2020 study, Texas, Florida and California each have one more congressional seat than they would have if people here illegally had not been counted in the most recent census, while Alabama, Minnesota and Ohio each have one less seat as a result.
In the big picture analysis, states that comply with federal immigration laws are penalized, while states that flout federal law and encourage illegal immigration are rewarded.
Reversing such an outrageous policy has proven to be a heavy lift.
The first iteration of the Trump administration attempted to remedy this problem by adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, but were ultimately denied when the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, sided with anti-border activists in blocking the question.
This ill-founded ruling guaranteed that states across the country would have their number of congressional seats and Electoral College votes inflated or deflated by illegal immigration for the duration of the 2020s.
The new Trump White House is flooding the zone with executive orders and other actions to seal our borders, deport criminal aliens and enforce federal immigration law. A victory in the census case would be a perfect complement to that effort, acting in the best interest of American citizens and bringing common sense to our elections and representation in Washington. The direction of our country should be set not by foreigners who came here illegally, but by the legal residents our government is meant to serve.
This article was originally published at www.thecentersquare.com
