California Would Lose Seats in Congress

By Nate Segal

Republican Senator, David Vitter of Louisiana proposes not to count immigrants in the 2010 census - even when they are documented immigrants.

We would have two classes of people in the U. S. One class lumps together all immigrants, even those who are following the process of naturalization; students who are here for several years, but don't where they will get jobs; employees of multinational businesses which need executives and people of talent to run American divisions; to mention only a few cases.

An issue that would come up immediately is "taxation without representation." Members of the above groups pay taxes, but Vitter's proposal denies them representation.

Immigrants own houses and pay real estate taxes in good faith. They enroll their children in our public schools. They need police and fire protection as much as the rest of us.

Is Senator Vitter proposing to exempt immigrants from Social Security and Medicare deductions? To be fair, many immigrants may never draw on their Social Security accounts.

Furthermore, multinational businesses might be less likely to do business with the U.S. on civil rights grounds. What kind of democratic ideal do we present to the world by pretending that people who actually live here don't really live here? The result, Americans lose jobs.

Those of us who are citizens make up the other class of "inhabitants."

Voting is a separate issue. One must be a citizen. This is understandable.

Nate Segal

California Would Lose Seats Under Census Change

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: October 27, 2009 - Copyright © 2009 The New York Times

A Republican senator’s proposal to count only United States citizens when reapportioning Congress would cost California five seats and New York and Illinois one each, according to an independent analysis of census data released Tuesday. Texas, which is projected to gain three seats after the 2010 census, would get only one.

The proposed change would spare Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania the expected loss of one seat each. Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon and South Carolina would each gain a seat.

If every resident — citizens and noncitizens alike — is counted in 2010, as the Census Bureau usually does, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Utah would gain one seat each and Texas would get three, the analysis found.

Losing one seat each would be Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to the analysis of census data through 2008 by demographers at Queens College of the City University of New York.

Appealing to his colleagues in states with fewer noncitizens, the Republican senator, David Vitter of Louisiana, warned this month that a vote against his proposal would “strip these states of their proper representation in Congress,” while including noncitizens would “artificially increase the population count” in other states.

Mr. Vitter’s proposal, which would generally benefit nonurban areas where Republicans tend to dominate, could also affect reapportionment within each state.

“If Congressional and other redistricting was done in this manner, it would mean that regions of states that had fewer immigrants, such as upstate New York, would gain, while those with many immigrants would lose,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a Queens College sociologist who analyzed the census data. “This is going to disempower immigrants massively.”

The Constitution, as amended, requires that Congressional districts be reapportioned on the basis of a count every 10 years of the “whole number of persons” in each state. The 10-question 2010 census form does not ask about citizenship, but the Census Bureau includes that question in other forms, including the 2006-8 American Community Survey released on Tuesday.

Supporters of Mr. Vitter’s proposal say that “inhabitants” [*] should mean only bona fide residents, and that questions were raised in the past about whether to count people in a variety of categories, like Indians and Mormon missionaries stationed abroad.

Opponents argue not only that the census has traditionally included every person, but also that the proposed change would delay the 2010 count and would also discourage immigrants in the country illegally from participating in the census.

The Queens College analysis largely confirmed Mr. Vitter’s assessment of the impact of his proposal on how Congressional seats would be apportioned among the states. His proposal, in the form of an amendment to a spending bill, would ban federal financing for the census if a citizenship question was not included. The proposal has not been put to a test yet in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where its prospects are considered doubtful.

The census’s latest three-year American Community Survey data suggested only incremental changes from the 2008 figures released last month. The percentage of foreign-born people ranged from 0.9 percent in metropolitan Altoona, Pa., to 36.9 percent in Miami-Fort Lauderdale, the survey found.

A separate analysis by William H. Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer, found that Dallas and Houston were attracting less-educated migrants and identified large brain drains from Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland and, to a lesser extent, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and Boston.

Meanwhile, Atlanta; Seattle; Austin, Tex.; San Francisco; and Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., were magnets for better-educated people who were relocating.

Another study, this one by the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a conservative-leaning research organization, found that households leaving New York in 2006-7 had average incomes 13 percent higher than those moving in.

But New York City’s Department of City Planning found that people moving to the city in 2005-6 had a higher income, were younger and better educated than those who left.

Copyright 2009 © The New York Times

* from Nate: The word 'inhabitants' does not appear in the Constitution for the purposes of mandating that Congess conduct a census.