President. I am pleased to be an original cosponsor of the amendment by the Senator from Alabama. . .. .. The ShelbyHelms amendment instructs the Census Bureau not to Include illegal aliens in the census count. For some absurd reason. the Census Bureau has decided to count illegal aliens in the 1990 census.. Mr. President.- we passed a similar amendment in July of this year by 58 to 41. However. the underlying bill. the Immigration Reform Act of 1989. did not become law. So we have one last chance to avoid a grave injustice. Mr. President. the Census Bureau policy Jeopardizes the constitutional right of North Carolina citizens to fair and equal representation. If the Census Bureau counts illegal aliens. the citizens of North Carolina risk losing a congressional seat. We lose a congressional Representative Just because some bureaucrats at the Census Bureau think the Constitution requires them to count illegal aliens. Mr. President. illegal aliens do not have the right to vote. So why should they have the right to determine the makeup of our Government? If illegal aliens are counted. States like California will gain a seat at North Carolinas expense. Therefore. Californians will have proportionally more congressional representation than North Carolina. They will have more votes in Congress thanks to people breaking the law and entering as illegal aliens. I simply do not believe that our Founding Fathers ever intended to let people who cannot vote and who break the law determine the political makeup of our Government. As Judge Noonan pointed 6ut. if a foreign army invaded our country on census day. we would not count them in the census. Nothing in the Constitution requires the counting of illegal aliens in the census. As Senator HATCH explained during the debate in July. the Constitution speaks of "persons" in the sense of* legal persons. not illegal. If the Constitution stands for anything it stands for legalitynot illegality.
Keywords matched
Immigration illegal aliens