alt Hacker News> addressing the selective application of the law to further conservative agendas
Does selectively not enforcing immigration law further liberal agendas?
- House seats (and therefore electoral votes) are determined by census - which includes illegal immigrant populations.
- If you can waddle across the border at 8.5 months pregnant, you can birth a citizen with no further requirements.
Ergo, "sanctuary cities" and other intentional lack of enforcement allow states to pump up their representation in Congress and increase government handouts.
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tkzed49 • yesterday at 1:38 AM
With all due respect, we simply have different views on the morality of the issue.
However, I would suggest others consider what an evil leftist, for example, could do with the same technology.
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Based on this research, the impact of these populations on the allocation of representatives is probably not particularly large: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/07/24/how-remov...
Sure, the House is almost evenly split, so a few seats here or there would have an impact. But the net result would probably be further mitigated by gerrymandering, other population shifts, and so on.
One other thing I appreciated from this article is how it touches on comments about simply following the law. Just because something is legal, does not make it morally questionable (at best). From the article:
> The apportionment of seats in Congress is required by the U.S. Constitution, which says that the census will be used to divide the House of Representatives “among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State,” except for enslaved people, who, until the late 1800s, were counted as three-fifths of a person, and certain American Indians.