Chairman. has been the guiding principle the Census Bureau and its predecessor agencies have discharged for nearly 200 years. Their mission has been. and continues to be. to count everY person. In this regard. citizens and noncitizens enjoy equal status. On census day anyone in this country is entitled to be counted and shall not be excluded from the census. This right to be counted was the subject of a lawsuit brought by a group called the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and by a few Members of this body late last year in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. This lthhour appeal to the court challenged the constitutionality of the Census Bureaus plans to include undocumented persons in the total census counts transmitted to the President and subsequently used by the States to reapportion congressional districts. The court dismissed their arguments that the inclusion of undocumented persons would somehow dilute the constitutional mandate of equal representation and undermined the principle of one man. one vote. In its decision the court stated: The language of the Constitution is not ambiguous. It requires the counting of the "whole number of persons" for reapportionment purposes and while illegal aliens were not a component of the population at the time the constitution was adopted. they are clearly "persons". We see little on which to base a conclusion illegal aliens should now be excluded. simply because persons with their legal status were not an element of our population at the time our constitution was written. According to the court equal representation is only a rough goal in national apportionment. It means. "equal representation for equal numbers of people"nothing more nothing less.
Keywords matched
undocumented noncitizens Immigration illegal aliens