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tables are included showing which individual States might be expected to gain or lose, the only supportable conclusion that can be drawn from the tables is that excluding illegal aliens from the apportionment population might well make a difference in apportionment. Judgments on which individual States might

10

be affected would be speculative at this time, however.

COUNTING ILLEGAL ALIENS IS NOT A NEW PROBLEM

The illegal immigration problem is sometimes cast as a mid- to latetwentieth-century phenomenon. Yet, the effort in 1929 to require the Census Bureau to count both the legal and illegal alien population produced debate showing that this matter was of concern to the Congress at a period when

:

illegal immigration was probably not as large a component of total immigration as it has been in the 1970s and 1980s. The debate from Sen. Hugo Black's

11

failed effort to amend an automatic reapportionment bill to require the Census Bureau to enumerate aliens 12 illustrates the depth of feeling about illegal immigration at the time, and presages many of the concerns raised today about the Census Bureau's accounting of illegal aliens.

In the 1929 debate, proponents of requiring the Census Bureau to "include an enumeration of aliens lawfully in the United States and of aliens unlawfully 13 in the United States" argued:

10

It is theoretically possible for so few illegals to be counted in 1990 that no seats would shift as the result of an adjustment.

11 The amendment lost by a vote of 24 yeas to 56 nays. (Congressional Record, v. 71, May 28, 1929, p. 2083.)

12 S. 312, 71st Cong., 1st Sess.

13

Congressional Record, v. 71, May 28, 1929, p. 2078.

89-822 0 - 88 - 6

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It certainly cannot be said that the United States should not know how many aliens are unlawfully in the country.

The aliens are here illegally, taking jobs of American citizens living under American standards, and whenever an effort is made to pass legislation for the purpose of getting information on this subject some argument is advanced about the impossibility or the unconstitutionality of any effort to protect the present American citizenship from a surplus of foreigners.

One of the ways to find out whether or not a man is unlawfully in the country is to ask him when he came, how he came, and where he came from. Another way is to find out whether or not he was born in

this country.

Why could not the census enumerator ask these men at what port of entry they came in, and then we could communicate with the port and see if their names were on the record?

There is nothing strange about the amendment and nothing revolutionary. It is merely a proposition suggesting that we utilize the machinery which is at hand to get as much information as we can to determine the fagts with reference to the entrance of immigrants

into the country.

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Opponents of the measure to require the Census Bureau to enumerate illegal (and legal) aliens argued:

I hope he [Sen. Black] will point out how a census would be taken of
the aliens unlawfully, in this country--how they could be tracked
19
down and enumerated.

Anyone coming into the country illegally would have to lie or sneak
in and if he lied his way in, does the Senator think the answers we
would get in these statistics would justify the expense and trouble
that would have to be entailed to obtain the information? If a man
is going to steal his way into the country, if he gets here
illegally, certainly anything that comes from him should be taken
with a grain of salt, and the information so obtained would be

worthless.

I would like to suggest to the Senator that if an alien is here
unlawfully, what we really want is not an enumerator but a policeman
to arrest him.
It is
the business of an enumerator to look
after violators of the law.

...

I am very sure that everybody would assent to the proposition that it
would be exceedingly advantageous to know about how may people there
are in this country who are illegally here; but how could a census of
them be taken by anyone?

The Senator from Alabama has properly called attention to, and during
this whole debate repeated comment has been made about, the large
number of persons who have entered this country illegally.
Personally I think the figures have been exaggerated, though I think

it is deplorable that there are so many immigrants smuggled into the

country.

Many of the points made by these Senators six decades ago are being made in the current debate about counting illegal aliens in the census and

including them in the apportionment population.

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The next

two sections describe and evaluate a method for producing State24 by-State estimates of the number of illegals counted in the census (in the

following example, the 1980 census) when the census questionnaire has not identified them as illegals. The method is from an independent study by two Census Bureau employees, Jeffrey S. Passel and Karen A. Woodrow. It would have been as germane to the 1929 discussion as it is to the present report.

METHOD USED TO ESTIMATE ILLEGAL ALIENS COUNTED IN THE 1980 CENSUS

Passel and Woodrow's study is an application at the State (and the District of Columbia) level of a residual (subtraction) method used earlier by Robert Warren and Passel at the national level to estimate the number of

illegal aliens counted in the 1980 census. Warren and Passel's procedure, which is described in subsequent paragraphs, can be summarized as follows: the estimated number of aliens residing legally in this country at the census date (based on adjusted alien registration data from the Immigration and Naturalization Service [INS]) was subtracted from the adjusted total number of aliens (legal and illegal) included in the 1980 census, and the difference was assumed to represent illegal aliens. Warren and Passel made separate computations--by age, sex, country of birth, and period of entry into the United States--for aliens from 40 countries or areas.

25

24

If illegals are to be excluded from the population count used for apportionment, the important point is how many illegals are included in the census, not how many there are in the United States.

25 Passel and Woodrow, Geographic Distribution of Undocumented Immigrants, p. 642. Warren, Robert and Jeffrey S. Passel. A Count of the

(continued...)

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Preferably, both sets of data necessary to obtain the number of illegal

aliens counted in the 1980 census would have come from a single source--the census. In such a case, the number of illegal aliens would have been obtained by subtracting the census count of legal aliens from the count of all aliens. This approach was impossible, however, because aliens' legal or illegal status could not be ascertained from the census data. Thus, an independent

26

estimate of legal aliens (from INS, rather than census, data) had to be substituted for the census count of legal aliens, with the possibility of a less-than-perfect match between the estimate and the actual census count of

this group.

1980 Census Data

The 1980 census long-form questionnaire, which was sent to approximately a fifth of the U.S. population and included questions about country of birth, citizenship of foreign-born persons, and year of immigration to the United States, was the source of census data on the alien population.

Warren and Passel modified the census count of aliens to correct, insofar as possible, errors in the data due to erroneous responses or nonresponses to the above questions--errors that, if uncorrected, would have distorted the estimate of illegal aliens.

Considerable misreporting of citizenship was

25 (...continued)

Uncountable: Estimates of Undocumented Aliens Counted in the 1980 United
States Census. Demography, v. 24, no. 3, August 1987.
P. 376. (This article
was originally a paper presented at the 1983 annual meeting of the Population
Association of America. The paper was not an official Census Bureau document.)

26

Warren and Passel, A Count of the Uncountable, p. 377.