Speech #990092373

Mr. President. I am today introducing legislation to require that future census figures be adjusted to exclude illegal aliens from the population count used to apportion the House of Representatives. The Subcommittee on Energy. Nuclear Proliferation. and Government Processes. which I chair. has held oversight hearings on the planning now underway by the Bureau of the Census for the 1990 Decennial Census. Most recently. on September 18. we heard testimony from the Census Bureau. the Immigration and Naturalization Service. and a noted law scholar on the impact of illegal aliens on apportionment. and we reviewed the power of Congress to deal with this problem. The Bureau of the Census has made special efforts to ensure an accurate and complete accounting of the Nations population. The policy of the Bureau is to count every inhabitant in the country on Census Day. I expect that the Census Bureau will do an even better job of counting the Nations population in 1990. However. few people realize that the total will include illegal aliens who are here in violation of the laws of the United States. Illegal immigration has increased dramatically during the last few decades. as we all know. At our subcommittee hearing. INS and Census Bureau officials testified that an estimated 4 to 6 million illegal aliens are in the country at the present time. and that the number may be growing at a rate of up to 300.000 per year. At that rate. there could be as many as 7.5 million illegal aliens in our country when the census is taken in 1990. This means that our next congressional reapportionment could include almost twice as many as were counted in 1980. when the Census Bureau counted an estimated 2.057.000 illegal aliens. This number was only slightly less than the entire population of my State of Mississippi. In fact. the number of illegal aliens counted in 1980 was greater than the populations of 18 States. Mr. President. if the illegal alien population were distributed among the States proportionately. the impact on apportionment would be negligible. But the fact is that 81 percent of the illegal aliens that were counted in 1980 were located in only five States50 percent were in one State. Based on testimony before the subcommittee. we can expect the growth of the illegal alien population to occur in these same States. According to the Census Bureau. the inclusion of illegal aliens in the apportionment following the 1980 census affected the allocation of two House seats. California. with over 1 million illegal aliens. gained an additional seat in the House. New York. with almost a quarter of a million illegal aliens. was able to retain a seat it would have otherwise lost. These seats would have been allocated to )eorgla and Indiana. whose combined illegal alien population was only 20.000. if the illegal aliens had not been counted for apportionment purposes. Mr. President. I am disturbed that seats in the House are being allocated to States because of the presence of illegal aliens. who. if our laws were enforced. would be deported. I am even more disturbed by the possibility that a congressional district could be comprised primarily of illegal aliens. while citizens and legal residents of another State lose representation in Congress. Furthermore. constitutional rights are violated when voters in districts with a disproportionately large number of illegal aliens have a greater voice in choosing a Member of Congress than those in districts where there are only a few. The Congress is empowered by the Constitution. according to our hearing record. to remedy this inequity by excluding illegal aliens from apportionment. My bill would in no way alter the allocation of Federal program dollars based on total population. It simply requires that the population count used for apportionment includes only those persons who are legally residing in the United States.