Picture a shareholder meeting where the company hands out voting proxies to anyone who wandered in off the street, share certificate or not. That is roughly how America has apportioned its House of Representatives for two centuries, and on Sept. 9, the Trump administration finally proposed fixing it.
The Census Bureau’s new rule, headed for the Federal Register this week, would redraw the population count used to divide the House’s 435 seats among the states for the 2030 count. Citizens and green card holders would count. People living here illegally, along with many people on temporary visas, generally would not. The bureau argues those groups lack the “tie and allegiance” to the country that a qualifying “usual residence” requires. The public gets until Oct. 13 to comment before a final rule and, almost certainly, a lawsuit.
I have spent three decades managing money for people who expect precision. Nobody at my firm hands a proxy vote to someone who never bought into the fund. Yet Washington has apportioned the nation’s most powerful legislative body by counting everyone physically standing in a state on Census Day, legal resident or not. That is not a rounding error. Pew Research estimated that excluding illegal immigrants from the 2020 count would have shifted three House seats, with California, Texas, and Florida losing ground to Alabama, Minnesota, and Ohio. Three seats sound small until you remember that one seat can flip a majority, and every seat carries an Electoral College vote with it.
The constitutional argument against the rule is not frivolous, and a fair-minded reader deserves to hear it stated plainly. The Fourteenth Amendment requires counting “the whole number of persons in each State,” not citizens, not taxpayers, not registered voters. Critics, correctly, note that the framers used “citizen” elsewhere in the Constitution when they meant citizen, and chose “persons” here instead. For 230 years, the Bureau counted physical residents regardless of status, and the Supreme Court has never blessed an exclusion on the merits. In 2020, the court tossed a challenge to a similar Trump-era plan as premature rather than ruling it constitutional, and the count that year still included everyone.
Here is where the administration’s read holds up better than critics want to admit. Apportionment was never meant to be a simple census of bodies. It exists to allocate representation within the political community that the Constitution creates; a community built on citizenship and lawful, durable membership. A green card holder has made a legal commitment to that community. A tourist, a student on an expiring visa, or someone who crossed the border last month has not, whatever their temporary address may be. Counting them anyway does not just misrepresent population; it lets state governments capture congressional seats and federal dollars by hosting people with no permanent stake in American self-government. That is not compassion. It is a loophole, and loopholes get closed once enough people notice them.
The practitioner in me has one more objection, and it is not ideological. The Bureau says it will lean on administrative records from DHS, Treasury, and State to sort people into categories. Anyone who has sat through a bank’s know-your-customer review knows how messy record matching gets at scale, mixed-status households, lapsed visas, pending asylum claims. Get the matching wrong and you either undercount citizens or hand critics a legitimate accuracy complaint that has nothing to do with the underlying policy. The rule’s ambition is sound. Its execution needs to be airtight before a single House seat moves.
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The proposal’s companion move, dropping race and ethnicity questions, deserves its own honest look rather than a reflexive defense. Those questions feed civil rights enforcement and legitimate public health planning, and I would not toss them out with the bathwater just because they arrived in the same regulatory package as a change I support.
None of that changes the core point. A country that cannot say who belongs to it cannot govern itself, and a census that hands congressional seats to states based on people with no legal stake in the outcome is not neutral; it is a subsidy for open borders dressed up as demography. The comment period runs through mid-October. If you think representation should follow citizenship rather than zip codes, say so in writing, because the next fight over this rule will happen in a courtroom, and courts respond to records, not sentiment.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.