At the 68th Grammy Awards, a day before Groundhog Day, singer Billie Eilish spied her shadow in a spotlight beam and predicted endless Hollywood posturing on illegal immigration.
“No one is illegal on stolen land,” Eilish said, offering a neat epigrammatic falsehood about the United States that is catching on. But it’s a boneheaded analysis, which she unwittingly excused by adding, “It’s just really hard to know what to say and what to do right now.”
One longs for intellectual springtime to replace such torpid propaganda. Eilish and many leftists say people of northern European ethnicity, such as herself and those who founded the United States, have no right to this country, but their outrage is extraordinarily selective.
Although it’s true that America is the national home of people not descended from its first inhabitants, that makes our country the same as almost every other square inch of land on the planet. It is only reflexive anti-American attitudes, not logic or historical knowledge, that prompts Eilish and her ilk to single out the U.S. for condemnation.
The singer and the beautiful boneheads who nodded their approval in Los Angeles on Sunday are motivated by vapid ignorance and ideology, but others are motivated differently. They arrive at the same place by cold calculation instead. They oppose deporting those here illegally because these schemers know that illegal immigrants help Democrats win elections.
It does not require even a single illegal immigrant to cast a vote for this to be true. Every person living in the U.S., citizen or noncitizen, legal or illegal, is counted in the census every 10 years. The census determines how many seats each state has in the House of Representatives, how many federal dollars flow to each state, and how many votes it will cast in the Electoral College, which decides the presidency.
What are the chances, slim or none, that what we see at work is purely an ideology of inclusiveness when Democrats make their states and cities sanctuaries for illegal immigrants? When they refuse to cooperate with federal agencies enforcing the law and deporting those who should not be here? When they call the feds Nazis to incite residents to commit acts of violence and obstruction? Instead of an airy love for foreigners, elected Democrats are motivated at least as much by unsentimental math.
The Center for Immigration Studies calculates that 7.8 million illegal immigrants live in sanctuary jurisdictions. That is a little more than 56% of all illegal immigrants in America who live in places with special protections mostly run by Democrats.
On average, one House member on Capitol Hill represents 761,000 people. So California, a sanctuary state with more than 3 million illegal residents, gets four more seats in the House and in the Electoral College than it would if illegal immigrants were excluded from the census. New York has 868,000 illegal immigrants, while Illinois and New Jersey have more than half a million each.
States run by Democrats can be expected to lose 10 House seats after the 2030 Census, four in California, two in New York, and one apiece in five other states, including three that are sanctuary states. They are losing seats not directly because they are sanctuaries, but because residents are fleeing to better-run states — ones with lower taxes, yet better services and law and order.
Some states seeing net immigration from other states, such as Texas and Florida, also have many illegal immigrants. But these states are run by Republicans who cooperate with federal agencies by handing over criminal illegal immigrants for deportation. They are not, in other words, gaming the system, often violently, to keep their grip on more sway in Washington and more tax dollars.
From 1820 to 1950, the census included a question asking whether the respondent was a citizen. Then the question was dropped for more than half a century. President Donald Trump proposed in 2018 that it be added back again in 2020, but Democrats went to court complaining that it would discourage immigrants from answering questions.
Now, a bill from Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), the Equal Representation Act, would restore the citizenship question and deduct non-citizens from state totals to determine House seats and Electoral College votes. The legislation has passed out of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and is awaiting a vote on the House floor. Even if it passes there, it will probably go to die in the Senate, where Democrats will filibuster it.
TRUMP SHOULD STOP BRITAIN’S STUPIDITY
There is room for debate over whether legal non-citizen residents should be counted for House apportionment. But since only Americans may legally vote, surely it is clear that only American citizens should weigh in on the Electoral College, and thus in the choice of president.
Democratic-run states are determined that illegal immigrants should count along with legal ones when deciding who should sit in the Oval Office. That is why, even when they genuinely believe the same tripe as Billie Eilish, they fight tooth and nail to keep illegal immigrants in America.