While the well-organized among us are starting to make our plans for 2027, the folks who work at the U.S. Census Bureau already have their 2030 planners out, getting ready to conduct the constitutionally mandated decennial count of people in the country. In preparation, the Bureau is proposing significant changes to ensure fair representation for the American people in the coming decade.
The Census is more than just an enumeration of the people who are in the United States at the start of each new decade. It is a blueprint for how Americans are represented in Congress, the number of electoral votes each state wields in presidential elections, how federal dollars are disbursed around the country, and much more. In other words, each Census has a profound impact on the lives of every American. Thus, who is counted and for what purposes is important.
Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution is clear that a count of each state’s population must be carried out every “Term of ten Years.” Who should be counted and how the count should be carried out is somewhat vague. The Constitution was ratified in 1788, at a time when slavery still existed in half of the new nation and when the indigenous Indian tribes were not considered to be citizens.
The Constitution requires a tally of “the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” The Constitution further instructs that the count should be conducted “in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”
Eighty years later, after the abolition of slavery, the 14th Amendment instructed that the Census count “the whole number of persons in each State,” but still excluded “Indians not taxed.” It was not until 1924, the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, that Congress included Native Americans as part of the body politic.
The history of the Census would seem to indicate that when the framers of our Constitution and its subsequent amendments talked about counting the “whole number of persons,” they meant to distinguish between people who were merely present and those who were to be represented. Rightly, or wrongly, they intended for certain categories of people to be excluded for the larger purposes of conducting a Census.
With the approach of the 2030 Census, the Trump administration is attempting to aggregate out people who are here with some sort of temporary legal presence and people who are here illegally from the larger count. The effort differs in some important ways from the earlier constitutional exclusions in that those were abhorrent forms of discrimination, while the exclusion of visitors and illegal aliens is entirely rational and justified.
The people who were counted as three-fifths of a person in 1788 were not merely permanent residents of the country; they were people brought to this country against their will and denied the freedom to leave, even if they wanted to. The American Indians who were not recognized as citizens until a hundred years ago were neither visitors nor illegally present. They were indigenous to the land.
Visitors to the United States are just that: Temporary guests. They have been granted permission to remain in the country for a specific time and purpose – to study, work, recreate, or due to temporary extenuating circumstances in their homelands – and then return home. Illegal aliens are here without the consent of the American people and are subject to removal at any time. It is perfectly justifiable to treat people who are simply passing through, or who are here without permission, differently when it comes to deciding who is a full-fledged member of our society.
Every person who is present in the United States on April 1, 2030, should be enumerated, but that is very different from affording visitors and illegal aliens representation in Congress and an equal allocation of public resources and money. Nor should states that encourage illegal aliens to settle be rewarded with additional federal dollars, additional seats in Congress, and additional electoral votes in presidential elections.
The Constitution makes clear that the Census is not a head count solely for the purpose of counting heads. It is a decennial exercise meant to ensure fair representation and fair allocation of resources for the American people. That objective can only be accomplished by making a distinction between people who are in America and those who are Americans.
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