Should the Census Bureau count illegal immigrants?

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By EUNICE MOSCOSO
Cox News Service

Monday, October 22, 2007

WASHINGTON - Texas, Florida and Arizona each stand to gain an extra congressional seat in the next Census count because of their large illegal immigrant populations, according to a recent study. Conversely, states like Ohio, Michigan and Missouri could each lose a seat because they have fewer illegal immigrants.

Is this fair? Some groups don't think so.

As the Census Bureau gears up to count every person in the United States in 2010, some are wondering if the government should include the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the total.

The Census numbers will be used to allocate billions of dollars in education, road construction, health care, and other government spending. It will also be used to determine congressional districts.

"It is unfair for some states to lose representation to other states because they have more people living there illegally," said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group that advocates lower levels of immigration. FAIR challenged the practice of counting illegal immigrants in the 1980 and 1990 Census but the cases were dismissed, Mehlman said.

FAIR believes that the Census should ask immigrants their legal status. Those who are in the United States illegally should be subtracted from the total when it comes to determining congressional districts, Mehlman said.

The recent study by the University of Connecticut examined the impact of illegal immigrants in the 2010 Census.

In addition to identifying states gaining or losing seats in Congress, it found that illegal immigrants will allow California to keep its 53 seats. Without them, California would lose two, the study says.

Meanwhile, some states, such as Georgia, will not be affected, according to the study. It calculates that Georgia will gain one seat based on the 2010 Census whether illegal immigrants are counted or not.

Orlando J. Rodriguez, author of the study, said that current high levels of illegal immigration create a shift in congressional seats from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and the Southwest.

Rodriguez also said that illegal immigrants should be counted in the Census, but that the division of congressional districts should be calculated differently.

The Connecticut State Data Center, which is part of the University of Connecticut, will release a report in December that recommends that the division of congressional seats "be disconnected from the Census count," Rodriguez said. He would not elaborate further on the plan.

Steven Camarota, director of research with the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports stronger immigration controls, said that high levels of legal and illegal immigration have led to a "distortion of the democratic process" where a lawmaker needs fewer votes to win in a district with a high number of illegal immigrants because the pool of U.S. citizens — and therefore potential voters — is much smaller.

Camarota also said this distortion undermines the principle of "one person, one vote," a bedrock of American democracy.

In Congress, Rep. Candice Miller, a Michigan Republican, has introduced a constitutional amendment that would apportion House districts based on a count of only U.S. citizens. The bill was also introduced in the last Congress but went nowhere.

Currently, the 14th Amendment mandates that the federal government count "the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed" to determine representatives.

Cecilia Munoz, vice president for policy at the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic civil rights organization, said that the purpose of the Census is to obtain accurate data of the entire population to make all kinds of important decisions.

"Anybody who thinks we shouldn't count their undocumented neighbors is shooting their community in the foot because all kinds of resource decisions on things like water and roads and bridges get decided on the basis of Census data," she said.

William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, said that many illegal immigrants would be afraid to participate in the Census if it included a question on legal status because they would assume the information would be sent to an enforcement agency.

In addition, he said congressional districts should be based on total number of people, not just U.S. citizens.

"As long as congressional districts and states have to provide services for people who are living there, whether they're legal or illegal, then the people representing them should have that kind of clout," he said