The Case For A Citizen-Only Census

Authored by Hayden Ludwig via RealClearPolitics,

Who is the census for? Or more importantly, who does Congress represent? If you answered “U.S. citizens,” you’re correct – or at least you should be.

At the start of each decade, the federal government tallies who’s living in the country and where, citizens and non-citizens alike. That census data determines how many seats in the House of Representatives each state receives, as well as its share of Electoral College votes for president. This whole process is mandated by Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, the part most focused on proper representation.

But representation for whom? Since 1790, anyone and everyone living within America’s borders, “excluding Indians not taxed.” That’s approximately 300 million Americans and 41 million non-citizens, the most in our nation’s history, nearly half of them living here illegally.

Non-citizens have never been allowed to vote in congressional elections. But they receive improper representation in Congress because the census fails to exclude them from the apportionment process, when all 435 House seats are divvied up between the 50 states and D.C. That’s dramatically inflated Democrats’ power in the House of Representatives as the non-citizen population has grown, at Americans’ expense.

Simply excluding 18.6 million illegal aliens – the most plausible estimate given by the Federation for American Immigration Reform – from the 2020 apportionment would shift eight House seats, mostly from blue to red and purple states. Removing all 41 million non-citizens would shift a stunning 22 seats the same way. In either case, these are districts that should represent U.S. citizens; instead, they’re brimming with non-citizens, and Democratic Party politicians prefer it this way.

Blue states, on average, report nearly double the percentage of non-citizen residents than red states: 6.3% to 3.7%. Of the top 20 states with the largest percentage of non-citizens, only six vote red or purple. Democrats also control seven of the 10 House districts with the most non-citizens; the other three are held by Republicans, either born in Cuba or who are children of Cuban immigrants. Those seats were, until recently, Democrat-controlled. I’ve documented more such revelations in my recent investigative report, “The Emerging Permanent MAGA Majority.”

Immigrants tend to flock to states with more job opportunities, which tend to be in states with big cities such as California and Texas, the states with the largest foreign-born populations. But as people have abandoned unlivable “progressive” fiefdoms for conservative southern states, this has turned the problem of representation inflation into a cynical opportunity to unfairly boost Democrat power.

To show this in action, imagine two congressional districts with equal populations of 760,000 residents, the national average. District A contains 700,000 U.S. citizens and 60,000 non-citizens. District B has 400,000 U.S. citizens and 360,000 non-citizens (some of them illegal aliens). Both districts elect one congressional representative, but District A’s congressman represents 360,000 more voters than District B.

As a result, a vote in District B is effectively worth twice as much as a vote in District A, because there are far fewer District A voters dividing up the same congressional seat.

Stacking blue districts with so many non-citizens lets a smaller electorate punch above its weight. This isn’t a mystery; it’s a core feature of Democratic electoral strategy. Take it from Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY), who admitted of illegal aliens in 2021 that “I need more people in my district, just for redistricting purposes.” Thirty-five percent of Clarke’s constituents are foreign-born, the 23rd-highest in Congress.

Counting non-citizens also artificially boosts the number of House seats in blue states, even as Americans flee Chicago and New York City for Phoenix and Jacksonville. Democrat-run states lost a net seven House seats between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, and would’ve lost three more seats had the Census Bureau not overcounted six blue states. In 2030, they could lose between six and nine House seats, according to recent projections.

Ironically, many of the immigrants who are unintentionally boosting Democratic seats hold traditional social views, yet they skew congressional representation toward the far left simply by living in blue cities. They’re moderates represented by radicals. They’re also “voting” without a vote.

This has been the logic governing Democratic strategy for nearly three decades: Encourage mass immigration, discourage border enforcement, and reward illegal aliens with U.S. citizenship. It’s why Democrats bet the farm on Hispanics building a permanent majority in Washington – never imagining that Donald Trump could convert millions of Hispanic voters into America First populists.

That’s good, but it isn’t enough to restore America’s greatness. We have to push further and end Democrats’ cynical exploitation of the census for good.

Conservatives are hawks on closing the border, but they’ve largely missed or ignored the injustice of counting non-citizens in the census. This isn’t good politics, nor is it ethical. States such as Idaho, Ohio, and Tennessee are robbed of congressional representation because California, New Jersey, and Texas house so many non-citizens. In other words, some states are punished for having a big population of Americans – including naturalized immigrants – while others are rewarded for attracting migrants, even if they entered illegally.

This is why it’s crucial to ask who the census is for, rather than how we’ve always done it.

The founding generation viewed the census with a very different priority than we do today: Building a nation rather than preserving one. They adopted an expansive definition of American citizenship, assuming that loyalists, British sympathizers, and other Tories would self-deport from the republic – as some 80,000 actually did. The 1790 census counted as citizens everyone who claimed the new identity of “American” and proved it by remaining within the nation’s borders after the war.

Article I, Section 2 counted three-fifths of indentured servants and black slaves, but excluded Indian tribes. Why the distinction? Because one group lived under U.S. jurisdiction while the other did not. The census was never fundamentally about collecting interesting demographic data, but apportioning congressional representation. It was already outrageous and hypocritical that slaves, denied citizenship and legal rights, still inflated the southern states’ seats in the House. Yet the principle was already clear: Representation belongs to those who owe allegiance to the United States Constitution, not foreigners under another sovereign power.

This is the same logic that limits voting rights to U.S. citizens. No one outside of woke Berkeley is offended that non-citizens cannot vote for our leaders, although a few blue states are trying to normalize it. In fact, bipartisan voters have approved recent Citizen-Only Voting Amendments in huge numbers in red and blue states alike.

Paul Jacob, who chairs Americans for Citizen Voting, the group behind these ballot initiatives, points out that voting and representation are inextricably linked. “Only citizens should be voting in our elections, and each state’s representation should be based on the number of U.S. citizens in the state. Not on how many illegal aliens they’ve let in,” he told me. “No longer can we allow states to grab extra voting power in Congress by counting their illegal population.”

To fix that, we don’t need to deport every single illegal alien (though we should strive for that). We simply remove them from congressional apportionment and let the process play out fairly. Call it a “Citizen Only Census,” a return to the Founders’ high regard for citizenship after decades of being dragged through the mud by Democrats. The simplest way to do this is to restore a citizenship, or place of birth, question to the 2030 Census. This was the case in all but one census from 1820 to 2000.

The first Trump administration tried to in 2019 and lost 5–4 in the Supreme Court, but only because the court ruled the Commerce Department hadn’t provided sufficient procedural justification. The high court did not rule that it’s unconstitutional. Quite the opposite, actually: “The Enumeration Clause [Article I Section 2] does not provide a basis to set aside the Secretary’s decision,” the justices explained.

President Trump’s first administration started late, used the wrong arguments, and still came within one vote of winning that fight. The takeaway is obvious: Start earlier with a better strategy. The court’s transformation since 2019 ought to encourage them. Originalists have gained control of two liberal Supreme Court seats, establishing a supermajority and raising hopes that the court would approve restoring the citizenship question if given a second chance.

That’s an opportunity patriots – and America itself – can’t afford to miss.