Senator David Vitter (R-LA) has proposed an amendment to a spending bill that would prohibit the 2010 census unless a citizenship question is included.  Kudos to Senator Vitter.

Senator Vitter’s whole pretext is that areas with large immigrant populations are disproportionately represented in the Congress of the United States.  States with large immigrant populations – California (five seats), Texas (two seats), New York and Illinois (one seat each) – benefit from counting these immigrants, legal and illegal, in their census that decides the appropriation of the Congressional representation.

The Constitution requires that Congressional districts be reapportioned on the basis of a count every 10 years of the “whole number of persons” in each state.  Should legal immigrants be counted?  Illegal immigrants?  They can’t (legally) vote for the representation, so it remains a valid question.

Every ten years, this country enters a debate on what, and how, to count the census.  Should we do sampling instead of an all inclusive census was the big debate in 2000.

In my opinion, the legal immigrants should be counted – they are in this country legally and deserve representation in the making of the laws that govern the country.

However, the illegal immigrants, should not be counted, IMO.  Estimates vary, but as many as 20 million illegal immigrants are in the US at this time.  California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina account for about half the undocumented population – the inclusion of these illegal immigrants would disproportionately allocate house seats to these states.

Likely, this amendment will go nowhere – in the liberal, left wing environment that exists in the House and Senate today, the Democrats would be petrified to consider such a count – it would anger the voting populace that ties its heritage to those countries who account for most illegals.

But, Senator Vitter’s idea deserves a fair debate.  Should the definition of “whole person” include those individuals who are in this country illegally?  Legally, but without citizenship?  Alas, we will probably never have this debate.