Counting the Illegals?

By Paul R. Hollrah
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/ho ... id=1314729


The 2010 Census is just around the corner, and Republicans and Democrats disagree whether illegal aliens should be included in the official count. FSM Contributing Editor Paul R. Hollrah tells us what’s at stake in this latest political game of cat and mouse.

Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution provides for a national census every ten years, for the purpose of determining representation in Congress. It is not a simple matter to count noses in a nation of more than 300 million people, but as government and society have grown more and more complex in the past 220 years, census figures have come to be used for purposes far beyond determining congressional representation.

As the Brookings Institution has described the uses of census data, “Every year, the data are used to allocate billions of federal dollars. And every day, thousands of business and government decisions – such as where to open new stores, where to build homes and schools – depend on these data. To an extent far greater than commonly understood, the functioning of our society relies on the accuracy, down to the neighborhood level, of Census population statistics.â€