An executive order President Trump issued this week to exclude undocumented immigrants from the official calculation of how many seats each state gets in Congress has raised questions about how the administration will adjust formal Census findings.
Few Census experts expect Trump’s order to withstand legal scrutiny when it inevitably lands in court. Several states and groups have already issued litigious threats, pointing to a constitutional requirement that all persons be counted in the decennial Census.
But beyond the legal questions, those same experts had a more fundamental query: How does the administration plan to count those who are in the country illegally?
It is not clear if any formal federal dataset covering undocumented workers exists. The Supreme Court last year blocked the administration from requiring the Census Bureau to ask whether respondents were citizens. Other agencies track immigrants in the country legally, though experts say there is no official way to track how many are in the country without authorization, or where those people live.
Read more at The Hill.
{Matzav.com}
It won’t survive the court fight.
Even with the citizenship question you still would have this issue, because the Executive Order only forbids counting ILLEGAL immigrants and does not discount LEGAL immigrants and visa holders.
What I think he is trying to accomplish here is to clarify that there is a legitimate need to know how many people are citizens etc. and he may also be trying to shift the conversation and thereby shift national opinion ( the fringes pull at the center)