census data affects electoral votes. and while people who aren't citizens shouldn't be able to vote, from a moral standpoint electoral votes should still be representative of the number of humans living in a certain area. even non citizens should be represented, being that we can't conceivably deport them all or even a majority of them. many go on to have children who are citizens, and deserve at least a modicum of representation on that and more basises, such as paying a variety of taxes.

if u add citizenship to a census you're naturally going to reduce the number of people represented by that census data, and it could effect electoral counts.

it's tangential to be sure, but it does have an actual effect.

your (hopefully feigned) ignorance concerning that question is quite hilarious, considering it was only stopped after documents of deceased republican gerrymandering guru thomas hofeller became public, revealing what every halfway intelligent person was already able to identify as a move clearly intended to discourage voting by minorities: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-question-hofeller.html

so your whole 'b-b-but how could this possibly be yet another attempt to disenfranchise voters, it's but a simple question' shtick is about half a year late, and 40 IQ short...



both obviously. repeatedly misspelling a word the exact same way clearly indicates you don't know the proper spelling. confusing 'there' and 'their' is a grammatical error. neither is a 'typo' or explained by 'typing on a phone' or whatever your next spineless excuse will be... and again, none of that is even remotely as embarrassing as your dodge of my main argument.

This arugment might apply to the House, where the allocation of districts among the states is performed based on resident population, not citizen population. But it shouldnt have nearly the same impact on a presidential election where each state votes en bloc.

Moreover, while I get the argument in favor of allocating Congressional seats based on overall population, this means that states which are negligent at enforcing federal immigration laws, or which are attractiing large illegal populations by hosting lots of sanctuary cities, will effectively be rewarded for this behavior with more political power. And that is something I personally cannot possibly support.

Similarly, birthright citizenship made sense in its historical context, but nowadays, it rewards the families of illegal immigrants - and the states hosting them - with political power, which is also something I cannot possibly condone.

whether it's correct way to do things is arguable. for sure. but u asked what effect it COULD have. not what effect it SHOULD have.


on a less arguable basis the govt should have data on how many people live where, citizens or not. and it should be as accurate as it can be. simply asking "are you a citizen" is bad for the accuracy of the data, it might be right morally, but from a data standpoint its not arguable.

its a tradeoff. not asking about citizenship might provide more accurate data in other fields, but at the expense of not knowing these people's citizenship status. you're sacrificing one important variable to improve the quality of the data on other variables. what this boils down to, imho, is that the opponents of the citizenship question dont consider the citizenship status to be important; that they consider the possible government actions which reqire citizenship info to be of low priority and/or morally objectionable anyway.

while i personally find citizenship info on the # of illegals to be important and interesting, im not coming up with a large number of relevant uses by the Federal govt.

whereas population data generally is more wide reaching in it's data use. # of illegals really only help ICE be more targeted in enforcement. population data generally can be used to calculate tax effectiveness on jobs, its used in roads and traffic calculation, etc.

so really it comes down to data thats really important in a limited scope, vs data that's nominally important in a maximum scope.

well, for instance, citizenship info can be used to distinguish: for the purposes of normal funding allocation (roads, hospitals, police districts and such), the overall population numbers can be used, while citizen population can be used for the seat allocation in the House or in state legislatures - so that illegal immigration is not needlessly rewarded with political power.

citizenship info can also be used to provide more targetted funding for integration programs, language courses and things like that. or to fund cultural sensitivity training for persons that will have a lot of contact to the noncitizens living in a region, say hospital employees, government officials, cops, teachers, etc.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Dec 19 2019 12:10pm

all true, and still illegal immigrant counts still only have contexts in the scope of illegal immigration and the drawbacks of it. its hard to calculate focused scope versus the cumulative effects of far reaching scope. but generally the cumulative effect in such a wide array gives the nod in that direction. like if you calculate health benefits of something good for your heart versus water intake, which has health benefits for the entire body head to toe.

Just hypothetically: imagine california over the next years takes in a further 40m illegal immigrants from latin america, doubling CA's population count - would it be fair that this would gift democrats 55 additional votes in the electoral college and the corresponding number of house seats, and thus cement Democratic dominance in presidential and House elections?

Now, that's obviously an unrealistically high number, but the principle is the same even with much lower numbers. A criminal act diluting the political power of american citizens on the other side of the country is a big fucking deal and has cumulative effects of its own. This is not something with a very limited, focused scope.



I personally believe that decoupling illegal immigration and partisan politics as much as possible would really make all these discussions around immigration a lot less toxic and polarizing. In a similar vein, amnesty would be a lot more achievable politically if conservatives didnt have to fear that it would lead to Democratic dominance or to their tax dollars being spent on people who are only in the country because they broke the law.