Illegals Will be Counted in the U.S. Census

by Dave Eberhart: California could get nine House seats it doesn’t constitutionally rate because illegal aliens will be counted in 2010, concluded an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal. The forthcoming census, which determines the apportionment of House members and Electoral College votes for each state, will be counting all persons physically present in the country -- without regard to the legality of their status.

Set for big gains thanks to illegal populations is not only California but Florida, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, New York and Texas, according to the Census Bureau’s 2007 American Community Survey data. California has 5,622,422 noncitizens in its population of 36,264,467. Based on a round-number projection by the WSJ authors of a decade-end population in the Golden State of 37,000,000 (including 5,750,000 noncitizens), California would have 57 members in the newly-reapportioned U.S. House of Representatives.

“However, with noncitizens not included for purposes of reapportionment, California would have 48 House seats (based on an estimated 308 million total population in 2010 with 283 million citizens, or 650,000 citizens per House seat),” noted the report authors. . . .

“The Census Bureau can of course collect whatever data Congress authorizes. But Congress must not permit the bureau to unconstitutionally redefine who are ‘We the People of the United States,’” the authors argued. Dr. Elizabeth Grieco, chief of the Census Bureau’s Immigration Statistics Staff, told the WSJ that the 2010 census short form does not ask about citizenship because “Congress [The Democrat majority] has not asked us to do that.”

For sure , there has been a significant evolution from the kind of census envisioned by the founding fathers, noted the authors. In 1790, the first Census Act provided for the counting of “inhabitants.” “’Inhabitant’ was at that time a term with a well-defined meaning, maintained the authors. As the Oxford English Dictionary expressed it, an “inhabitant” was one who “is a bona fide member of a State, subject to all the requisitions of its laws, and entitled to all the privileges which they confer.” [Full Story]

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