Posted on 07/12/2018 8:42:40 AM PDT by yesthatjallen
A coalition of Latino civil rights organizations asked Thursday a judge in Alabama to include them as co-defendants in a lawsuit brought by the state against the federal government, seeking to exclude undocumented immigrants from the 2020 Census.
The groups, led by the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF) and Birmingham civil rights attorneys James U. Blacksher and Edward Still, said they don't trust the Trump administration to mount a defense to Alabama's lawsuit.
“One legal outcome of the Civil War was a Constitution that abandons the previous ‘3/5 rule’ and treats all persons as full ‘persons’; that Alabama, of all states, would challenge that change a century and a half later, is simply sordid,” said Thomas A. Saenz, MALDEF president and general counsel. “Even more contemptible, the current administration cannot be trusted to defend against the sordid lawsuit because the president and other administration officials regularly treat immigrants, in rhetoric and in practice, as less than human.”
At issue are billions of dollars in potential funding for states and the allocation of several congressional seats.The would-be defendants include groups from California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, all states that could lose out on funding and seats if undocumented immigrants were not counted in the Census.
Alabama filed the suit in May, with Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) as a co-plaintiff, arguing that counting undocumented immigrants would result in the state losing a seat in Congress.
The 14th Amendment of the Constitution mandates congressional apportionment to count "the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed," wording that MALDEF's lawyers argue includes undocumented immigrants.
The decennial census counts all persons in the United States, whether citizens or not, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Alabama's lawsuit has added controversy to an already-fraught census, as the Commerce Department -- the agency that oversees the Census -- added a citizenship question to the 2020 questionnaire.
Historically, the Census has undercounted minority and underserved communities for a plurality of reasons, including lack of willingness to participate.
Opponents of the citizenship question argue that some people will be deterred from taking the census if it means answering questions related to immigration status.
In their memorandum to the court, the groups seeking to join the lawsuit said the citizenship question would diminish Hispanic representation, while proving a logistical challenge to the Census Bureau.
“Even putting aside for the moment the logistical nightmare that the Census Bureau would experience if it tried to collect immigration status information about residents, information that it has never before collected, any such attempt would likely cause higher non-response rates and a disparate undercount in Latino and other population groups with higher numbers of immigrants than the population as a whole,” reads the memorandum.
Now the illegal aliens are trying to claim they are being treated as 3/5 a person...black slaves...
Do facts matter to anyone?
Nobody is seeking to exclude illegal aliens from the census. What they plan to do, is ask if people are US citizens.
Asking a question about citizenship is not excluding anyone from the census.
You are ZERO-fifths of a person, Illega.
You wanna go to Civil War over it, bitch?
They ARE being counted. We want to know how many citizens and how many illegal aliens
*rolls eyes*
Well, if they are here illegally, then they won't answer, and we will get an accurate count of citizens. And if they answer that they are not citizens, we get an accurate count of citizens. So, unless they lie, we get an accurate count. I don't see the problem, unless you want fraud.
Yep. When blacks were freed after the 1st civil war, they were made citizens by law. Big difference.
I treat them as 2 /5 ths
Asking a question about citizenship is not excluding anyone from the census
Why is it reporters can find a gathering of illegals but ICE is nowhere to be found?
“Even more contemptible, the current administration cannot be trusted to defend against the sordid lawsuit because the president and other administration officials regularly treat immigrants, in rhetoric and in practice, as less than human.”
There are about 7 billion people in the world, and virtually all of them are affected by the outcome of US elections. Shouldn’t they all be allowed to choose our President? Why should they have to go through the inconvenience of traveling here? Doesn’t their exclusion from the census make them “less than human”?
Since the census is used to apportion representation in Congress, and since only citizens are legally authorized to vote for those representatives, being able to count actual citizens, separate from illegals, sounds like a good idea to me.
Might seem like a good idea, but it would not really be following the Constitution. At the time it was adopted, women, slaves, many men, & children could not vote, yet they were still counted (if only 3/5s in the case of slaves) to apportion representation. To count only citizens for representation would require an amendment, I think.
the 3/5ths decision was a victory for the abolitionists.
only counting citizens is a defeat for the open borders crowd.
If they want representation they should go home, but then of course Mexicans still vote in Mexicos elections even when their U.S. citizens, don’t they? It’s funny, or not, I thought that a naturalized citizen had renounce all loyalty to foreign governments.
They do...
I had to raise my right hand and swear that I renounced my allegiance from my prior country New Zealand BEFORE I was allowed to be naturalized as an American citizen...it was part of the legal process...there is no such thing as dual citizenship in America...
Dear States,
If you want people who are residing in this country illegally to remain in your state. You pay for them.
Good points.
In my opinion, everyone should be counted, but at the same time, we should know how many non citizens are here.
Just because someone is not a citizen, doesn’t mean that someone is here illegally.
If I recall correctly, after previous censuses, the census bureau issued estimates of the numbers of people who were not counted.
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