There were two primary constitutional purposes for a census.
- Taxation
- Representation
(Insert your own taxation without representation jokes here.)
For the purposes of taxation, a warm body adds to the wealth of a state, but for the purpose of representation, Indians were not included, however indentured servants were and black slaves were semi-included in order to reward slave owners with power. This would eventually serve as one of the causes of violence in Kansas and the Civil War.
There is no reason post-slavery to count non-citizens and especially not people whose presence here is illegal in order to bolster the power of those states. If illegal aliens were an economic and political deficit, California would be much less likely to harbor them.
Instead California, like many blue states, benefits from ‘ghost districts’ full of illegals and non-citizens who provide them with extra congressional seats they do not deserve.
President Trump is right to call for a new ‘clean census’. If the Dems want population bragging rights, it’s perfectly fine to distinguish between various classes of people, the Constitution certainly did, but no one who is illegally in this country ought to be counted. The matter might have been overlooked if we were talking about a population in the thousands or even the tens of thousands, but we are dealing with an illegal population in the tens of millions.
Even as debates continue over ‘gerrymandering’ illegal aliens are one of the ways that the Dems have boosted their political representation.
And that is why they’re fighting against it.