Say Anything Blog

Whoa...

There's a House hearing today on whether and how non-citizens should be excluded from the census count for purposes of apportionment, since as foreigners they shouldn't have representation in Congress. I published something on this a couple years back and the way it works is that foreigners -- legal immigrants, "temporary" workers and students, and illegal aliens -- are counted for purposes of distributing House seats among the states and for drawing district lines for both Congress and the state legislatures. For instance, Indiana, Michigan, and Mississippi each lost a congressional seat because of illegal aliens in other states were included in the 2000 census. And if the president gets his way, his millions of additional "willing workers" will also be counted and have representation in Congress.

This is a problem with illegal immigration that's never occurred to me before. Illegal immigrants aren't getting to vote for representation in Congress, but some states are losing representation thanks to large illegal immigrant populations in other areas.

This is just another reason why we need to strengthen our border security while simultaneously streamlining the process for becoming a legal citizen. That way all these illegals can actually vote for representation in Congress and citizens in other states won't lose representation.

This is also another reason why the President's "guest worker" program should be rejected in whole.