The Trump administration has unveiled a new census proposal that could reshape how political power is distributed across the United States, including a plan to exclude many noncitizens from the population count used to allocate House seats and Electoral College votes. The proposal, released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau, would establish new rules for determining who counts for congressional apportionment and remove race, ethnicity and sexual-orientation questions from future 10-yearly census forms.
Census officials argue the changes are needed to better align the census with its constitutional purpose of determining representation in Congress, writing, "illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, as they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a 'usual residence' in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States." If adopted, the proposal would likely face immediate legal challenges and could reignite a debate that has stretched across multiple administrations as to whether everyone living in the U.S. should be counted when determining political representation, or only those with more permanent legal ties to the country. Newsweek reached out to the U.S. Census Bureau for further comment Wednesday morning.
At the center of the proposal is a new definition of who should be counted in the census for allocating Congressional seats. The Census Bureau proposes counting U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents while excluding undocumented immigrants and potentially other foreign nationals whose legal status is deemed less durable than permanent residency. The agency argues that the Constitution's requirement to count persons "in each State" should be interpreted through the concept of "usual residence" and that people living in the country illegally do not have sufficient ties or allegiance to the U.S. to qualify.
The proposal would also allow the Bureau to rely heavily on administrative records from federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Treasury Department and State Department, when determining whether someone should be included in the count. Officials are also specifically seeking public comment on whether a legal-status question should be added to future census forms. The other major proposed change revolves around barring questions about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation from the questionnaire.
Officials argue that removing those questions would reduce response burdens, increase participation and improve the accuracy of the population count used for congressional representation. The agency says demographic information could still be collected through other surveys such as the American Community Survey. The census determines how the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are divided among the states after each census.
Electoral College votes are then calculated based on a state's House delegation plus its two U.S. senators. As a result, even relatively small population changes can carry enormous political consequences. A state that gains enough population to secure an additional House seat also gains an additional Electoral College vote.
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