(RepublicanJournal.org) – The House has passed a new bill that, if it gets through the Senate, will stop illegal immigrants from being counted for key political decisions. The legislation would add a citizenship question to the US census — numbers from which are used to decide how many House and Electoral College seats each state gets. However, while the bill scraped through the House, it’s unlikely to survive in the Senate.
Illegals Skew Census Numbers
Every ten years, most recently in 2020, every household in the US is supposed to complete a census form. The data collected from this massive survey is used for many purposes, but one of the most important is apportionment. Based on what the census says about how many people live where, states are allocated House seats and votes in the Electoral College. This ensures that every state’s influence in the federal government and in choosing our presidents is proportional to its population.
The problem is that, while illegal immigrants can’t vote in federal elections, thanks to a 2021 executive order issued by President Biden they’re still counted in the census. That means states with large numbers of illegals are getting more congressmen and electoral votes than they should. As Representative Chuck Edwards (R-IL) said in a recent statement, “The mere presence of illegal immigrants in the US is influencing electoral outcomes.”
House Approves Solution
To fix this problem, in January, Edwards introduced the Equal Representation Act. This would add a question on citizenship status to the census, allowing seats and votes to be distributed according to the number of US citizens in a state instead of the total number of people.
Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), who jointly introduced a similar bill to the Senate, has warned that while Americans are leaving crime-ridden cities and moving to red states, the places they’re leaving are using illegal immigrants to bulk out their population numbers and hang on to their influence in the House and Electoral College.
On May 8, the House voted in a tight 206-202 decision, to pass Edwards’s bill. The problem is that, with the Democrats narrowly controlling the Senate, the partner bill introduced by Hagerty and Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) is unlikely to pass there. Democrat opponents of the legislation claim it’s actually red states that benefit most from counting illegal immigrants, but they’re still determined to block any change.
The last attempt to exclude illegals from the census failed in June 2019. Former president Donald Trump had tried to include a citizenship question but was blocked by the Supreme Court.
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