Alabama Sues to Keep Illegal Immigrants Out of the Census

Liberals have been complaining for the last six months about the Trump administration’s decision to ask questions about legal citizenship on the 2020 U.S. Census. They believe it’s somehow immoral and illegal to use the Census to determine how many people are in the country without papers.

Putting aside the absurdity of their argument, liberals aren’t the only ones concerned about how the Census treats illegal immigrants. In a new lawsuit against the Census Bureau, the state of Alabama is arguing that by counting illegals as a part of the U.S. population, the government is unfairly awarding sanctuary cities and states with extra money and representation.

The lawsuit comes down to this: Because grant money and House representation is determined by how many people live in a given state, places like California have an unfair advantage due to the number of illegal immigrants who reside there. According to Alabama, it is asinine to continue lavishing more political representation and more money on a state that is only growing due to an unrestrained influx of illegal labor.

In arguing that Census respondents should not be asked about their citizenship, liberals say that the Constitution mandates that every person be counted, regardless of their legal status. This is not necessarily a fair reading of the law, however, and it has not been tested in court. According to attorneys for Alabama, “persons,” as defined when the 14^th Amendment was ratified, was never meant to include illegal residents. Rather, it was meant to identify “inhabitants” of each state.

“In the public law of the founding era,” Alabama writes in their lawsuit, “the term ‘inhabitant’ did not encompass unlawful residents because inhabitance was a legal status that depended upon permission to settle granted by the sovereign nation in which an alien wished to reside.”

It remains to be seen how the courts will receive this argument, but we have to admit, it makes a lot of sense. To argue otherwise would be to insist that, when drawing up our congressional system, the founders wanted states with NON-CITIZENS to be represented more fully in Congress than states with a larger percentage of legal residents. That makes absolutely no logical sense. It defies belief. But if you want to argue that illegal immigrants should count just as legal citizens…that’s exactly the case you’re making.

But before any of that can be solved, we must first determine exactly how many Census respondents ARE illegal immigrants, and that’s exactly what the left is trying to prevent. That tells us that they know what’s coming next.