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With No Final Say, Trump Wants To Change Who Counts For Dividing Up Congress' Seats:
President Trump released a memorandum Tuesday that calls for an unprecedented change to the constitutionally mandated count of every person living in the country — the exclusion of unauthorized immigrants from the numbers used to divide up seats in Congress among the states.
The memo instructs Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Commerce Department, to include in the legally required report of census results to the president "information permitting the President, to the extent practicable" to leave out the number of immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization from the apportionment count.
But the move by the president, who does not have final authority over the census, is more likely to spur legal challenges and political spectacle in the last months before this year's presidential election than a transformation of the once-a-decade head count, which has been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.
[...] Since the first U.S. census in 1790, both U.S. citizens and noncitizens — regardless of immigration status — have been included in the country's official population counts.
The fifth sentence of the Constitution specifies that "persons" residing in the states should be counted every 10 years to determine each state's share of seats in the House of Representatives. The 14th Amendment, which ended the counting of an enslaved person as "three fifths" of a free person, goes further to require the counting of the "whole number of persons in each state."
It is Congress — not the president — that Article 1, Section 2 of the country's founding document empowers to carry out the "actual enumeration" of the country's population in "such manner as they shall by law direct."
In Title 2 of the U.S. Code, Congress detailed its instructions for the president to report to lawmakers the tally of the "whole number of persons" living in each state for the reapportionment of House seats. In Title 13, Congress established additional key dates for the "tabulation of total population."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @01:58PM (1 child)
I've lived most of my life in the suburbs about 30 miles from a large US city and we've always had a noticeably large population of "illegal" or "undocumented" or whatever the PC (Politically Correct) term is these days. They're mostly from Central America but most people refer to them as "Mexican" (because they come through Mexico to get to USA). They don't speak any English, usually work in construction, restaurants, lawn cutting / landscaping / gardening. In fact many job ads in those industries require Spanish-speaking ability.
In one town near me there used to be so many Spanish-only speakers that the local McDonald's had a dual-language (English and Spanish) menuboard 40 years ago. I'm sure that's common in areas of the US that are near Mexico, especially San Diego, Los Angeles, etc., but I'm talking 2,000 miles away from Mexico in northeast USA. They mostly worked in a very specific agricultural industry, and that was well known. I used to know a woman who had dated the son of the owner of a very large farm and she knew well about them bringing box-vans full of undocumented workers from Texas (where much of the US-Mexico border is). Gentrification occurred and the farms are now gone and so are the "illegals" and so is the McDonald's Spanish menuboard.
Point of all of this is: sure, cities have lots of immigrants, but there are more out in the 'burbs than may be commonly known. We tend to be quieter about things than city folks.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bmimatt on Friday July 24 2020, @05:28PM
"I'm sure that's common in areas of the US that are near Mexico, especially San Diego, Los Angeles, etc., "
As a San Diego resident: no, you're wrong.