Speech #980246790

President. last Friday I received some disturbing new information from the Congressional Research Service. Responding to a request that I made. CRS confirmed that the counting of illegal aliens in the 1980 census distorted reapportionment. It has been firmly established that there is a large population of illegal aliens currently residing in the United States. Estimates of the number of illegal aliens range from 3 to 12 million. In late 1979. certain agencies within the Federal Government decided that an unprecedented special effort would be made to encourage illegal aliens to respond during the 1980 census. The Justice Department even went so far as to restrict the Immigration and Naturalization Service from apprehending illegal aliens before. during. and after the census. to encourage them to respond and be counted. In response to this misguided policy. I. along with dozens of my congressional colleagues. filed suit to stop the inclusion of illegal aliens in the reapportionment base which is the population total used for dividing up congressional seats among the States. Although we wanted illegal aliens counted. we did not want to see them represented in Congress. It was our firm belief that including illegal aliens in the reapportionment base was a violation of the constitutional principle of "One man. one vote." This principle says that the Government must not weaken one persons vote and strengthen anothers. By including illegal aliens in the reapportionment base. the Government was weakening the votes of voters in States that have few illegal aliens and strengthening the votes of voters in States where illegal aliens live. The most graphic example we offered was of some States losing congressional seats because of the illegal aliens being counted by the census. Our case went to the Supreme Court of the United States twice. but we were in essence told that we were premature. To be specific. in FAIR v. Klutznick. 486 F. Supp. (D.D.C.). appeal dismissed. 447 U.S. 916 (1980). the Court dismissed the case for lack of standing to sue. The Court held that it could not determine before the 1980 census which of the plaintiffs lived in States that would lose congressional seats as a result of counting illegal aliens. The Court said that it would have to speculate on which plaintiff could properly bring the suit. and it was unwilling to make that kind of guess. The 1980 census has now been taken. and the results are in. The Census Bureau says that it actually counted 2.1 million illegal aliens in the United States. It also claims that it probably missed at least half of the illegal aliens actually here in 1980. However. with this information we now know that these 2 million illegal aliens caused a shift of at least four congressional seats. We also know that the shift in the number of seats is probably larger because all illegal aliens were not counted. Using the census data. the Congressional Research Service recomputed the reapportionment formula to show that the result would have been different if the illegal aliens had not been given representation. CRS estimates that the presence of illegal aliens in the United States in 1980 cost two States each a seat in Congress. Illegal aliens took two congressional seats away from the States of Georgia and Indiana. The State which gained an unearned congressional seat is California. and in addition. New York did not lose a seat which it otherwise might have.