President Donald Trump is correct in seeking to exclude illegal aliens from being counted in the U.S. census. Census numbers determine the apportionment of congressional seats as well as spending. The illegal immigrant population should not be here in the first place, so it should have zero effect on seats or spending.

But Trump must go further and finally fix the census, which the Left has used for years to thwart the assimilation needed to handle the high number of foreign-born residents. There are more than 50 million such residents in the United States, accounting for 15.6% of the population, handily beating the record of 14.8% set in 1890.

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Unbeknownst to most Americans, the administration has already done a great deal of good to stop the census from balkanizing the country by quietly shuttering the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations in February. Now it must follow through and eliminate racial and ethnic categories such as Hispanic and Asian American.

Make no mistake, these categories exist to give the Left the same thing illegal aliens should not receive: funding and political power.

These reforms would return the census to its original, neutral purpose as intended by the Founding Fathers.

Not counting illegal aliens would help not just apportionment, but also redistricting, which is very different and has been very much in the news lately. Counting illegal immigrants dilutes the voting power of citizens. Think of two districts with equal populations; the one with more illegal residents has more power than the other.

Counting illegal aliens also gives blue electoral districts an unfair advantage. As Peter Kirsanow, the chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, explained last year, districts with higher illegal populations tend to vote blue.

Not counting illegal aliens would reduce the size of districts with high numbers and lead to redrawing better electoral maps. Counting illegal residents gave blue states a net gain of 14 seats after the 2020 census, said Kirsanow. This is on top of 2020’s overcounting in blue states and undercounting in red states, which the Census Bureau has already admitted.

The last time Trump tried to get the census to count only citizens in 2019, the Supreme Court blocked him. It called the administration’s argument that the data would produce better voting rights enforcement pretextual and charged that the administration had violated the Administrative Procedures Act. 

But the court left the door open to trying again in the future, provided the administration provided better reasoning. The administration just needs to get better lawyers and make its case, which is solid.

The same is true for eliminating the racial categories. The race or ethnicity of an American should also have zero effect on how many Congressional seats — and therefore, electoral college votes — or federal spending a state receives. 

Most Americans don’t know it, but many of these categories were set up by leftist activists in the 1970s to balkanize America, instill grievances into the members of the new categories, and thus seed sufficient animus against the U.S. to transform the republic substantially.

The Left sought the end of assimilation, and it nearly achieved it.

Conservatives especially ignore this history, much to their demise. They lose interest as soon as the subject of the census racial categories comes up. 

Not the Left. Liberals understand the value of the census, which is why they’ve made it their domain over the years. It was leftist activists, especially those working at La Raza and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who pushed for the creation of the ethnic categories such as “Hispanics” in the first place. They spent the better part of the late 1960s and 1970s intimidating the bureaucracy into making groups out of whole cloth.

At first, the bureaucracy fought back. In her very good 2014 book, Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats & Media Constructed a New American, the lefty Berkeley professor Cristina Mora quoted Conrad Taeuber, associate director of the 1970 census, arguing with Robert Gnaizda, MALDEF’s attorney, that a Hispanic category was not needed.

“I’m not sure what you mean by Mexican Americans,” Taeuber explained to Gnaizda. “Let me tell you what we have. We will have in the [census] report … the number of persons born in Mexico who are living in the U.S. and California. We will have the number of persons born in the U.S. who have a parent born in Mexico. We will have this figure, the Spanish-language population, and we will have the number of persons who reported Mexican in response to the question of origin. That’s who we have.”

But the men and women at MALDEF and La Raza were not interested in data. They wanted a Hispanic category that would lump Mexican-Americans with Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and others “to persuade them to classify ‘Hispanics’ as distinct from whites,” as Mora put it.

That, “would best convey their national minority group status,” said La Raza executive director Raul Yzaguirre. “There is a difference between a minority group and a national origin group — a difference recognized in terms of national economic and social policies.” 

MALDEF’s Vilma Martínez was more to the point: “We are trying to get our just share of political influence and federal funds.”

Finally, in 1977, the Left obtained its holy grail. The Office of Management and Budget issued Policy Directive No. 15, which created what some have dubbed “the ethno-racial pentagon” we have had for decades: whites, blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. 

All of these, but especially the last two, are a mishmash of different races, cultures, diets, and outcomes, but that has never mattered to the Left. It got its money and power.

The Census Bureau slapped the ethno-racial pentagon on its decennial census for the first time in 1980, and it has stuck with us since. 

As social scientist Alice Robbin put it, “Federal statistics have created a similarity of identity where none existed, as with ‘Latino’ identity based on shared language rather than culture, and as with an ‘Asian’ identity based on shared discrimination and ethnic stereotyping.” 

“Collective amnesia,” averred Mora, would in due time lead the country to believe that there is such a thing as a Hispanic and Asian race, and that these artificial groups have been around forever. 

Former President Barack Obama tried to add a category for Middle East North Africa in 2016 to make Hispanics and Asians into an effective race (ethnicity and race were separate questions in the census up to now). But after Trump was elected, writers such as John Fonte and I alerted the administration to this danger and stopped it.

But Biden brought back MENA and racializing Hispanics and Asians. These changes will be used for the first time in the 2030 census unless Trump stops the entire thing, as he must, by rescinding OMB’s 1977 policy directive and those that have followed.

And it was leftist groups that in 1974 also created the NAC, and then made it their plaything. The membership of the committee was made up of ethnic studies professors, critical race theorists, and other leftist luminaries.

Ethnic interest lobbying organizations such as MALDEF, La Raza, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice became “influential beyond their numbers in the public policy process, as well as in influencing administrative policy regarding rules for statistical and administrative data collection and reporting,” Robbin wrote. As a result, she added, “minority interest groups … became an enduring part of American political life.”

As I put it myself in my 2020 book, The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free, “The doleful role of the Census Bureau’s national advisory committees (NACs) is the establishment of identity politics.” 

“Eliminating the NAC,” I wrote, “is an important step toward finally ridding society of identity politics.”

The Trump administration quietly did just that on Feb. 28, when the Census Bureau announced, “The Secretary of Commerce has determined that the purposes for which the National Advisory Committee was established have been fulfilled, and the committee has been terminated.”

This caused nary a stir on the Right, but the Left hollered. The Urban League issued an alarmist statement calling shutting down the NAC, “a significant step backwards for public trust and transparency.” The League of Women Voters fumed.

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The Left’s nightmare is that as people intermarry, their children are “likely to think of themselves as part of the mainstream, rather than as minorities excluded from it,” as demographer Richard Alba said. The categories are there to maintain a notional segregation. NAC member Julie Dowling made it very clear at a November 2018 meeting when she was asked whether someone with a mix of ethnic backgrounds could tick the Hispanic box: “If you have Latino ancestry, you can be a yes.”

Trump is making a bid to become one of the most consequential presidents in American history. He’s doing that by correcting many of the things the Left enacted in the 1960s and 1970s. The list is long. Fixing the census would be one more crucial corrective.