Political battle simmers on counting noncitizens in census

Posted at 12:00 AM on Sunday, Nov. 15, 2009

WASHINGTON – Steve Gándola, president and chief executive officer of the Sacramento Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, wants to count all Latinos in the 2010 census, including millions of noncitizens.

Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter wants only legal citizens included in the official count.

And the Rev. Miguel Rivera, who heads the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, wants illegal Latino immigrants to boycott the U.S. census as a way to show their displeasure with Congress' refusal to overhaul national immigration laws. His motto: "No legalization, no enumeration."

With the largest Latino population in the nation, California has a big stake in the debate.

The Golden State would lose five of its 53 House seats if noncitizens were not counted, according to a study by Andrew Beveridge, a professor of sociology at Queens College in New York.

And many fear that even a partial boycott would be counterproductive, reducing California's official population count enough to cost the financially battered state millions of dollars in federal aid.

"A boycott may simply have the effect of putting our region and the Latino community at a disadvantage," Gándola said.

His group has launched the Sacramento Latino Complete Count Committee as part of a regionwide campaign to work with religious, business, government and nonprofit organizations in an attempt to get all Latinos counted in the census, which begins April 1.

The number of Latinos living in the United States is now approaching 50 million. In 2008, more than 13 million Latinos resided in California, comprising 36 percent of the state's entire population, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

The census numbers are used every 10 years to reapportion congressional districts, dividing the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives among the 50 states.

California, which gained seven seats after the 1990 census, gained one seat after the 2000 census, bringing its total to 53. If there is no change in who is included, the state's delegation is not expected to change by more than one seat after the 2010 count.

Census numbers also are used in allocating federal benefits.

Rivera said a boycott will get the attention of Democrats who control Washington as they look ahead to reapportionment and the subsequent redrawing of congressional district lines.

With minorities more likely to vote Democratic, he said, the party's leaders will want to make sure they have strong minority participation to strengthen their hand when new lines are drawn.

"We understand the political benefits of having a strong count," Rivera said.

Citizenship has never been a requirement, dating back to the first census in 1790, when each slave was counted as three-fifths of a person, said Clara Rodriguez, a sociology professor and census expert at Fordham University in New York.

"Slaves were not citizens," she said. "They did not become citizens until after the Civil War."

In the days of the Homestead Act, she said, there was no concern about the status of people who settled in Oklahoma and elsewhere because the nation was being flooded with immigrants: "I don't think that anybody was asking whether they were citizens," she said.

The Constitution requires that the "whole number of persons" be counted, but some politicians differ on how that should be interpreted.

The issue has been receiving plenty of attention on Capitol Hill.

In the Senate, Vitter teamed up with Utah Republican Sen. Robert Bennett to introduce legislation requiring census takers to ask people whether they are citizens.