What The Citizenship Question Was About: Illegals Are Counted For Congressional Apportionment

Article publisher: 
VDare
Article date: 
12 July 2019
Article category: 
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body: 

The President has surrendered to the Supreme Court on the Census Citizenship Question. Here's what it was about—immigrants, legal and illegal, are counted for purposes of apportioning Congressional Districts.

In 2015, there was a story in POLITICO titled Illegal Immigrants Could Elect Hillary | How noncitizens decrease Republican chances of winning the White House next year, by Paul Goldman and Mark J. Rozell, October 3, 2015.

Hillary wasn’t elected, but it was a near thing, and alien apportionment worked for her, not Trump. The Constitution apportions Electoral College votes to the states by population. Some quite large number of America's population is composed of illegal aliens. An even larger number are legal aliens, who also can't vote, but whose presence is counted for electoral votes.

We call this the Rotten Borough effect, from the old British parliamentary districts where as few as seven actual voters could send one Member to the British House of Commons. There are 538 total electoral votes in the US, and 435 of them are apportioned by population. That means there is one electoral vote for every three quarters of a million residents in the United States, and many of them go to areas where immigrants are in the majority....

Related

How Middle America Is to Be Dispossessed Electorally, Patrick J. Buchanan, VDare, March 11, 2019:

In all but one of the last seven presidential elections, Republicans lost the popular vote. George W. Bush and Donald Trump won only by capturing narrow majorities in the Electoral College.
 
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The Democratic Party does not want to close the door to voting on migrants who broke our laws to get here and do not belong here, as these illegals would likely vote for pro-amnesty Democrats.
 
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Trump: No Citizenship Question for the 2020 Census, Liberty Nation, July 11, 2019: 

... It does appear that the modern Democratic [sic] Party is intent upon diminishing the status of American citizenship and, at least for the purpose of campaign soundbites and red meat for the base, Trump may be able to snatch at least a partial victory from what is otherwise a defeat: The constitutionally mandated census will not actually count the number of citizens – he will be able to argue – because the left objects to the very concept of citizenship. As he has proved so often before, Trump has a knack for turning the tables on his opponents and, though he has only his own people – and perhaps himself – to blame for the census defeat, he may yet use the outcome to his advantage.