Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz Rep. Matt Gaetz on Friday said Republicans are trying to stop Democrats from seizing political power on the backs of illeg
Rep. Matt Gaetz on Friday said Republicans are trying to stop Democrats from seizing political power on the backs of illegal immigrants.
The Fort Walton Beach Republican, in an email to constituents, highlighted HR 7109, known as the “Equal Representation Act,” which passed the House on Wednesday and now rests with the Senate.
The bill, according to Gaetz, would mandate that the U.S. census, beginning in 2030 and continuing thereafter, to include a checkbox for the respondent and every member of their household to indicate whether each individual is an American citizen.
In addition, the bill would require the Commerce Department to report the number of non-U.S. citizens living in each state. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, it excludes noncitizens from being counted toward the number of representatives each state gets in the House of Representatives.
Based on current trends, the effect would be to beef up influence in blue states that welcome illegals while punishing the red states they avoid that try to enforce the law. That’s because the census counts everyone, U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike.
As it stands, places like California and New York are losing congressional representation because their residents are fleeing to states like Texas and Florida, which are gaining political clout.
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In fact, the Census Bureau reported in December that the heavily red South accounted for 87% of the nation’s overall population growth last year, and is the only region to have kept growing during the pandemic.
As Gaetz noted in his email, the Equal Representation Act, introduced by GOP Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina, would “combat the unfair effects of illegal immigration upon the apportionment of congressional districts.”
This explains why not a single Democrat voted for the bill, which passed the House on a strict 206-202 party-line vote.
“I voted in favor of this commonsense bill,” Gaetz wrote.
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“Allowing illegal aliens to be counted toward congressional apportionment is absurd and has extreme implications by giving states with high numbers of noncitizens an inflated number of elected officials in the House of Representatives.”
“Given this reality,” he continued, “it is not hard to see how the radical Left could use the unprecedented influx of illegal immigrants to boost their number of legislators at the federal level. I refuse to see this take hold.”
“American citizens have already been disenfranchised enough by the derelict immigration policies of President Biden and the Democrats in Congress,” he added.
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