Congressmen to Sue Census Over Count of Illegal Aliens
A coalition of members of Congress announced Wednesday that they plan to sue the Census Bureau in an effort to force the agency to delete illegal aliens from its count in 1990. Some 40 members of the House joined the Federation for American Immigration Reform in announcing that the suit would be filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh, spokesmen said at a news conference here. The group contends that including the estimated 2 million or more illegal aliens in the national head count, which is used to distribute seats in the House of Representatives, will cause unfair shifts of seats from one state to another. Census officials say they are required to count everyone by the U.S. Constitution, which does not mention citizenship but only instructs that the House apportionment be based on the ``whole number of persons'' residing in the various states. That approach was upheld by a federal court in a similar suit, brought by the same immigration reform group, before the 1980 Census. Nonetheless, Dan Stein of the immigration reform federation contended that illegal aliens should not be allowed to be part of determining the political structure of the United States. Rep. Tom Ridge, R-Pa., said the Census Bureau should actually count everyone but that it should develop a method to determine how many people are illegally in the country, and them deduct that number from the figures used for reapportioning Congress. Rep. Jan Meyers, R-Kan., suggested including a question on the Census form asking whether respondents are U.S. citizerns.
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