President Donald Trump’s Commerce Department wants to remove illegal immigrants and certain temporary foreign visitors from the population totals used to allocate congressional seats, according to a Breitbart report. Since each state’s representation in Congress also affects its Electoral College vote total, the proposal could influence presidential elections as well.
Under the proposed census rule, the administration would revise how the federal government determines which residents count for congressional apportionment.
“In particular, the Census Bureau finds merit in the interpretive argument outlined above and has preliminarily determined that, under the best reading of the Constitutional mandate, 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,” the proposed rule states.
The Census Bureau offered an additional legal argument for the policy.
“Additionally and/or in the alternative, the Census Bureau has preliminarily determined, after revisiting and reviewing the applicable law, that excluding illegal aliens (among others) from the apportionment count is a lawful and appropriate exercise of the Census Bureau’s discretion under 13 U.S.C. 141, Franklin v. Massachusetts, and all other applicable law.”
Breitbart also cited a 2024 CIS analysis examining how noncitizen populations affect representation. The researchers associated each single percentage point increase in a district’s foreign population share with a 1.8 percentage point rise in the Democratic share of its two party vote.
“This reflects the fact that the voters who live around non-citizens tend to be Democrats, who end up having more voting power due to the presence of a large number of non-citizens,” CIS researchers wrote. “This is not evidence of non-citizens voting.”
Revising census apportionment would represent progress, but the proposal alone cannot address the broader consequences of mass migration. Congress should pair census reform with far tighter restrictions on both legal and illegal immigration so citizenship remains the basis of American political power.
