Noting a fine point of which I was not aware, and importantly, Avi Berman remarks in Mother Jones on the real purpose of the addition to the census form asking questions about citizenship:
In March, the Trump administration added a question about US citizenship to the 2020 census for the first time since 1950, leading critics to charge that the question was a deliberate effort to reduce the response rate among immigrants and the political power of the cities and states where they live. But at a congressional hearing on Friday, another potential motive for the controversial census question was on full display: using the data to allocate political representation on the basis of the number of citizens in a district or state rather than the total population.
Such a move would mean a fundamental shift in the way representation is determined, dating back to the country’s founding, when the framers of the Constitution decided the balance of representation would take into account populations that didn’t have the full rights of citizenship, such as slaves and women. It would also significantly diminish representation for areas with large numbers of immigrants and shift political power to whiter and more Republican areas.
It is an interesting question to me; perhaps everyone else is aware of it, though. Disentangling the third-rate GOPers‘ influence from it is a bit sticky, of course, but it helps to pretend this is actually a proposal of, say, General George Washington. If such a personage would present such a proposal, how would you react to it?
My first impulse is to agree: representation is for citizens, now isn’t it? It seems commonsensical. Yet, the Founding Fathers might not agree. One of the compromises reached among them was the counting of slaves for purposes of the Census, fixed at counting each as three fifths of a free person:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
A slave is not a citizen, for a citizen is a free person, absent imprisonment for criminal activities. Yet, they were to be represented regardless.
Despite the Constitution’s apparent provision for the non-citizen, we might soberly consider reasons for or against. Occurring to me:
- Proper assessment of the needs of a given region cannot be achieved without knowing the number of real persons consuming any Federally-provided resources. In cases of emergency, asking for proof of citizenship is both impractical and ungenerous.
- Failing to give proper representation to those non-citizens may lead to sentiments of discontent, and while the pro side of the argument for representation for citizens only may view this as a discouragement to potential illegal immigrants, discontent in situ may result in violence perpetrated on citizens.
- Discouraging illegal immigrants has the potential to turn away those ambitious enough to leave their home countries for the strange, new world of the United States. There is something to the idea that those willing to emigrate have qualities desirable to the United States; this xenophobic hostility does little good for natives in the long run.
- Discouraging illegal immigrants shuts out crime. This is indisputable, but measuring this good is difficult. Is there an identification of the number of such immigrants in ratio to the total illegal immigrants? What is an acceptable percentage vs the indisputable desirable immigrants of point 3?
- It is remarkably difficult to find reasons for the pro side of this argument beyond the problematic point 4 and the hypothetical Representation is for citizens!; indeed, I begin to suspect that the argument is little more than an empty slogan. One might argue that a naturalized citizen, through investment of the time and energy to gain citizenship, is naturally loyal to the state, but that hardly addressed the first three points.
So has SCOTUS weighed in on this debate? Avi provides an answer to that question:
Ceasing to count noncitizens, documented or undocumented, toward redistricting and reapportionment would mark a dramatic departure from longstanding democratic norms and recent Supreme Court precedent. In the 2016 case Evenwel v. Abbott, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states should draw legislative maps based on total population, not the number of citizens in a district. “It remains beyond doubt that the principle of representational equality figured prominently in the decision to count people, whether or not they qualify as voters,” wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a unanimous 8-0 opinion.
Unanimous, no less. It makes me wonder if the Republicans are just spinning their xenophobic wheels on this one.
