It fails to rationally explain why illegal immigrants who do not have the right to vote for elected federal office holders should be entitled, by virtue of their illegal presence in a state, to dilute the proportional number of representatives in Congress that citizens of other states are able to vote for.
The ACLU aims to incentivize unlawful entry of illegal aliens into the United States and their continued protection from deportation in sanctuary jurisdictions.
Illegal immigrants are "Persons," they argue, so they must be counted as part of "The whole number of persons in each state." But this is too simplistic and misleading.
There is a difference between immigrants residing in a state legally being counted for apportionment purposes and illegal immigrants whose residency status is inherently tentative from day-to-day if immigration laws are followed.
To use illegal immigrants' presence on the day a census count happens to be taken in determining the relative proportion of House seats per state for the next decade defies a common sense understanding of the forward-looking apportionment provisions of the Constitution.
As noted by a former counsel to the United States Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration, "In every apportionment census in United States history, some persons present in a state at the time have not been counted." He used historical evidence to persuasively argue that the drafters of the constitutional provisions intended that "Only certain persons present in the several states are to be included in the apportionment base, namely those who have some minimum degree of stability of residence in one of the states and who are among its number."
States that harbor illegal immigrants from possible deportation should not be allowed to benefit from actions at the state and local levels that perpetuate the continued presence of the illegal immigrants in those states.
The ACLU aims to incentivize unlawful entry of illegal aliens into the United States and their continued protection from deportation in sanctuary jurisdictions.
Illegal immigrants are "Persons," they argue, so they must be counted as part of "The whole number of persons in each state." But this is too simplistic and misleading.
There is a difference between immigrants residing in a state legally being counted for apportionment purposes and illegal immigrants whose residency status is inherently tentative from day-to-day if immigration laws are followed.
To use illegal immigrants' presence on the day a census count happens to be taken in determining the relative proportion of House seats per state for the next decade defies a common sense understanding of the forward-looking apportionment provisions of the Constitution.
As noted by a former counsel to the United States Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration, "In every apportionment census in United States history, some persons present in a state at the time have not been counted." He used historical evidence to persuasively argue that the drafters of the constitutional provisions intended that "Only certain persons present in the several states are to be included in the apportionment base, namely those who have some minimum degree of stability of residence in one of the states and who are among its number."
States that harbor illegal immigrants from possible deportation should not be allowed to benefit from actions at the state and local levels that perpetuate the continued presence of the illegal immigrants in those states.
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