POLITICO (“Trump administration proposes dramatic overhaul of 2030 census that changes who counts as living in America“):
The Trump administration proposed a sweeping overhaul of how people in America are counted in the 2030 census on Wednesday, including moving to exclude immigrants in the country illegally from the population totals used to determine political representation and not asking every American about their race and ethnicity.
I feel like I’ve seen this movie before.
Under a proposed rule released online by the Census Bureau, the agency would change its definition of a person’s “usual residence” — the standard that has long determined where someone is counted — to omit undocumented immigrants from the count used to divide seats in the House of Representatives among states.
The proposal would also exclude some immigrants who are legally in the country but do not have lawful permanent resident status, a potentially significant expansion beyond President Donald Trump’s previous attempts to remove undocumented immigrants from the population count.
That summary confuses more than it illuminates. Who are these legal but non-permanent residents? Tourists? Students?
The Federal Register proposal is long, convoluted, and includes a lot of ex parte commentary, along with legal analysis of past Census decisions and related judicial rulings. When they finally get around to their proposal, to no surprise, they say:
illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, as they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a “usual residence” in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States.
But what about the lawful but non-permanent immigrants?
the Census Bureau proposes to include lawful permanent residents within the apportionment base, while excluding from the apportionment base illegal aliens and aliens whose legal status is less durable and indefinite in length than lawful permanent resident status
Okay . . . .
The Census Bureau invites comments on whether other forms of legal status are materially similar to lawful permanent resident status.
Oh, I’m sure they love comments on how to do their job.
After a long paragraph explaining how they have access to all manner of records unavailable way back in the dark ages of 2020, it tells us
The Census Bureau is also proposing to define the relevant “census enumeration period” to run from January 3 to April 1 during decennial census years.
because
The Census Bureau has preliminarily determined that considering information pertaining to this period would be sufficient and appropriate for purposes of making a holistic determination about a person’s “usual residence” as of April 1, and that clearly defining a relevant period leading up to April 1 is preferable to leaving the issue open-ended and uncertain
Okay . . . ?
It then moves on to the proposal to stop collecting certain demographic data, which we’ll discuss shortly. So, bottom line, there are some lawful but non-permanent residents that the Census Bureau wants to not count, but it doesn’t yet know which ones those might be. Or, at least, it’s not telling us.
In a separate major change in the filing, the bureau is proposing to prohibit questions about race and ethnicity on the short-form census form and other questionnaires used to enumerate the population. The rule would also prohibit questions about sexual orientation.
Asking those questions is, after all, woke.
The changes, if approved and implemented for 2030, would have enormous political consequences. Census results determine how the 435 seats in the House are apportioned among states and form the basis for redrawing congressional maps. Race and ethnicity data collected through the census are also used to produce population data states receive for redistricting and to help enforce the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws.
Didn’t we get rid of those?
But, yes, not counting illegal aliens would eliminate somewhere between 11 and 15 million people from the enumeration. They are not distributed evenly across the states. According to a Pew study from last August, they break down something like this:
The six states with the largest unauthorized immigrant populations in 2023 were:
- California (2.3 million)
- Texas (2.1 million)
- Florida (1.6 million)
- New York (825,000)
- New Jersey (600,000)
- Illinois (550,000)
These states have consistently had the most unauthorized immigrants since at least 1980. However, in 2007, California had 1.2 million more unauthorized immigrants than Texas. Today, it has only about 200,000 more.
The U.S. unauthorized immigrant population has also become considerably less geographically concentrated over time. In 2023, the top six states were home to 56% of the nation’s unauthorized immigrants, down from 80% in 1990.
Presumably, the massive crackdown since the Trump administration came back to power has altered these numbers somewhat.
While I can absolutely understand not wanting to count these people for the purposes of apportioning Congressional districts—they’re residents, but not eligible voters—it would be bizarre not to count them at all. Given the administration’s insistence that these people commit a lot of crimes and suck up tons of welfare (claims which many so-called experts dispute), the states where they live need to federal funds to deal with the issue.
The report goes on to note,
The proposal amounts to a new approach to the fight Trump waged during his first term when the 2020 census was being planned, during which his administration sought to exclude undocumented immigrants from the numbers used to divide House seats among states.
The effort prompted several legal challenges and ultimately failed after President Joe Biden’s nascent administration ended Trump’s efforts to not include every person in America in the count. The scheduled 2020 census release was delayed into Biden’s term due to pandemic-related delays.
Trump won’t be President in 2030. Whether his successor will push to continue this remains to be seen, as does how the courts will rule. The Supreme Court dismissed a challenge in the last go-round on ripeness grounds, and the issue became moot when Biden changed course. Lower courts, however, did not look favorably on the exclusion, citing the plain language of the Constitution.
