The Utah case raises another matter. I suspect that had Utah taken the resources they
devoted to their legal case and put them into the LUCA program they would have found
enough additional address to get the 435th seat.
Stephen Dienstfrey
Schulman, Ronca, & Bucuvalas, Inc
(301) 608-3883
>> Patty Becker <pbecker(a)umich.edu>
10/30/03 12:59PM >>>
At 10:01 AM 10/30/2003 -0600, Paoni, Diane wrote:
Although I find the issue of the impact of including the population of
immigrants whose status does not allow them to vote into the reapportionment
process intriguing, some details in the article didn't seem right so I
looked at the report online (
http://www.cis.org/circle.html). Take a look
at this quote from the report regarding the study's methodology: "To measure
the political effect of immigration, we removed illegals, non-citizens, or
the entire foreign-born population from each stateĆ¢|"s population and then
recalculated the allocation of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives."
As I'm sure most of the folks on this list serve know, foreign born
population is not a good equivalent for immigrants who are counted in the
Census but can't vote.
In case you don't know, unlike what's implied in the news article Elaine
forwarded, naturalized US citizens can vote.
Diane Paoni
WisDOT Bureau of Planning
````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
Of course naturalized citizens can vote. I encourage readers to download
and read the report yourselves; it's only 8 pages. They did the
calculations based on eliminating three different groups from the
apportionment count: (1) illegal aliens, (2) non-citizens, (3) the
foreign-born. Obviously the latter is irrelevant and its inclusion, in my
opinion, is only for purposes of fanning the flames of the sponsoring
organization. I am also unclear on how they knew which non-citizens in the
census were illegal, since that's not an item on the questionnaire
(!) Apparently they used some INS estimates.
This all really comes down to the meaning of residence, for purposes of
inclusion in the census and the population count for reapportionment. As
such, it is highly political and who's on what side depends on who stands
to gain or lose. North Carolina beat out Utah for the 435th seat. The
report says that's because of counting the illegal aliens in NC. The
lawsuit Utah brought all the way to the Supreme Court, trying to change
this result and failing, argued that the young Mormon missionaries who are
abroad should be counted in Utah's population, which would then
(arithmetically) have given them the seat.
My personal view is that residence means living within the boundaries of
the 50 states and the District of Columia (although the DC population does
not count in executing the apportionment formula). This means that
non-citizens are counted and that people living abroad are not, whether
they're military or civilians. I say all this even though I'm from
Michigan, which according to the report lost its 16th seat because of the
counting of illegal aliens. People are people, they need services and they
need representation.
Patty Becker
ctpp-news(a)chrispy.net
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Patricia C. (Patty) Becker 248/354-6520
APB Associates/SEMCC FAX 248/354-6645
28300 Franklin Road Home 248/355-2428
Southfield, MI 48034 pbecker(a)umich.edu
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