President Donald Trump announced Thursday he instructed the Commerce Department to begin working on a census that does not include illegal aliens. It’s a long-overdue correction to a system that Democrats have exploited for years to tip the balance of power in Washington.
“I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024. People who are in our country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump said.
Trump previously signed a memo in 2020 that barred illegal aliens from being counted in the census. The memo was challenged and made its way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately did not rule on the merits as to whether all residents — regardless of their legal status — must be counted and if the president has the authority to exclude nonresidents.
The high court however did rule in the 1976 decision Mathews v. Diaz, a case regarding the Social Security Act, that while illegal immigrants are entitled to due process protections under the Fifth and 14th Amendments, they are not entitled to the benefits of citizenship.
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the unanimous court:
Neither the overnight visitor, the unfriendly agent of a hostile foreign power, the resident diplomat, nor the illegal entrant, can advance even a colorable constitutional claim to a share in the bounty that a conscientious sovereign makes available to its own citizens and some of its guests.
If voting, which is a benefit exclusively for citizens, is off-limits to illegal immigrants, it would be hard to imagine that illegal immigrants should be empowered to dilute the weight of a vote by artificially expanding the population and increasing the representational advantage of one area while taking it away from another area that is populated by legal residents. And yet, thanks to Democrats, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
President Joe Biden, of course, ordered the census to include illegal aliens and other noncitizens and, coincidentally, opened the floodgates at the border, letting in millions of illegal aliens — all of who which could be counted in the census.
And where are these illegal aliens welcomed with open arms?
Blue states and cities. And it’s not hard to figure out why, just listen to Democrat New York Rep. Yvette Clarke, who said in 2021 that her district “can absorb a significant number of these migrants” because “I need more people in my district, just for redistricting purposes.”
By incentivizing illegal aliens and including them in the census, states like New York and California are able to pad their populations and avoid losing House seats.
Of course, Trump’s announcement was not met without scrutiny from the usual suspects.
NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang framed it as an “unprecedented change to how the country has conducted population tallies,” while conveniently glossing over the fact that America wasn’t overrun by millions of foreigners who are here illegally.
Axios’ Herb Scriber headlined a piece: “Trump says he’s ordering a new census. Here’s what the Constitution says.” Scriber points to the 14th Amendment, which requires the “whole number of persons in each state” to be counted.
NBC News’ Alexandra Marquez says not counting illegal aliens would be “contrary to the Constitution.”
But that is a suspect conclusion drawn by the propaganda press. The Framers likely would not support the position that illegal aliens who invaded the nation should be counted in apportionment to determine representation. In fact, prior to the ratification of the Constitution, most northern states advocated for no slaves to be counted in the apportionment proceedings so that slaveholding states, some of which had slave populations as high as 43 percent of their total residents, would not have an unfair amount of representation compared to their actual voting weight.
Yet, we’re supposed to believe Axios, NBC News, and NPR that illegal aliens would have been counted in the census?
Counting illegal alien in the census skews congressional apportionment and the electoral college — and the American citizen pays the price in diluted representation and misallocated resources.
