But what does individuals being counted or not have to do with WHO gets federal aid or not? It may effect how much federal dollars go to a particular state or municipality, but it has NO impact on WHO personally gets those dollars.
And let's not forget the unintended consequences.
Here's just one; what happens if immigrant adults, legal or otherwise, have children who are citizens and who therefore qualify for the benefits due citizens, yet if their parents opt out of the census, those children don't get counter either and then the state where their school in located will lose out on federal funds allocated for education. The money will be reduced because the population of the state was less, but the number of kids in the school will remain the same.
And let's not forget that this has a large political implication as well. The Trump people are looking for as many ways as possible to punish those states which did not support him in 2016 and they know that states like California and New York have large immigrant populations and they would like nothing better then to artificially reduce the influence of these states and under-counting their numbers will do just that, both in terms of allocation of federal resources, as well as the potential that it could reduce their number of representatives in Congress, giving those seats to states with smaller numbers of immigrants.
The Constitution says nothing about whether only citizens shall be counted. In fact, when it was originally written, even slaves were included in the decennial census albeit at only a ratio of 3/5 of a freeman, but this was done so as to NOT disadvantage the South in favor of the North. So if our Founding Fathers were comfortable with slaves being included in the 'whole count', why would they have in their mind that they did not want to include immigrants?
Beside, I always thought conservatives were the ones arguing that we need to stick to what it says in the Constitution...
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