Apportionment study unveiled
By Lisa Vorderbrueggen
Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 2:42 pm in Congress.
The California Institute for Federal Policy Research has posted information about a study that shows the state would lose two of its 53 seats in Congress if the apportionment population excluded the state’s illegal residents.
Every 10 years, the Census Bureau counts the population for the purposes of establishing the appropriate number of representatives each state will send to Washington, D.C., in the subsequent decade.
This recent report, “Impact of Undocumented Populations on 2010 Congressional Reapportionment,” was written by Orlando J. Rodriguez, M.A., Manager of the Connecticut State Data Center within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Connecticut-Storrs.
Here’s what the California Institute had to say about the report: (The bipartisan institute offers quite a lot of good material about a broad range of federal issues although its web site is clunky.)
It is the policy of the U.S. Census Bureau not to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens in its population counts. (One of the very first sentences of the U.S. Constitution requires that House seats be apportioned based on the number of “persons” — no mention is made of citizenship.) In his study, Mr. Rodriguez opined that the presence of a significant population of undocumented individuals can affect the distribution of representation among the states. He posited two scenarios, one in which the Census Bureau counts all individuals in the 2010 census and another one in which it excludes the undocumented population from its count. Comparing those scenarios, he not surprisingly concludes that some western and southern border states receive more Congressional seats when all individuals are counted regardless of status, with the gain coming at the expense of some northeastern and Midwestern states.
As for California, Rodriguez found that although it, Montana, and New Jersey do not gain seats when undocumented populations are counted, California could stand to lose two seats if the undocumented populations were to not be counted. The report states, “California would keep its current fifty-three seats if undocumented populations are included. However, exclude this population and California loses two seats – dropping from fifty-three to fifty-one.” Rodriguez assumes a counted 2010 population for California of 38 million if undocumented populations are included; if they were to be excluded, the number counted would fall to 35 million. Hence, the report argues that the presence of California’s undocumented population will avert its losing House seats in the reapportionment that follows the 2010 Decennial Census.
The biggest winners coming from the counting of undocumented immigrant population, the report claims, are Arizona (+2), Florida (+3), and Texas (+2). At the other end of the spectrum are New York and Ohio, each of which are predicted to lose a predicted two seats with undocumented populations counted and one seat each if uncounted.
To download the study from the University of Connecticut website, visit http://ccea.uconn.edu/studies/CtSDC_2010Reapportionment_Final_2007sept19.pdf .
Every state has a State Census Data Center, with detailed demographic, economic, and other statistical information. For California, the State Census Data Center is part of the State’s Department of Finance, which has an extensive array of demographic, economic, and financial research information available at http://www.dof.ca.gov/Research/Research.php .
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