Including people without legal status in census had little impact on House seats

By MIKE SCHNEIDER, Associated Press

Republicans are trying again to exclude people who are in the U.S. illegally from the numbers used to portion out congressional seats among the states. But a new study says their inclusion in the past four censuses has had little impact on presidential elections or control of Congress.

If residents lacking permanent legal status had been excluded from the census numbers used in the apportionment process from 1980 to 2020, no more than two seats in the House of Representatives and three Electoral College votes would have shifted between Democrats and Republicans, according to the study by two demographers from the University of Minnesota and the Center for Migration Studies of New York.

The impact of including people who are in the U.S. illegally has been “negligible,” wrote the researchers.

“This would have had no bearing on party control of the House or the outcome of presidential elections,” they said.

Why does this matter?

The 14th Amendment states “the whole number of persons in each state” should be counted for the numbers used for apportionment, the process of allocating congressional seats and Electoral College votes among the states, based on population after each census. As a result, the U.S. Census Bureau has counted all U.S. residents in the once-a-decade censuses, regardless of their citizenship or legal status, and those numbers have been used for apportionment.