Can Illegal Aliens Be Excluded?
Excluding only illegal aliens from apportionment, while perhaps politically popular and appealing from a fairness point of view, would be even more difficult than excluding all non-citizens. The INS, Census Bureau, and other researchers estimate the number of illegal aliens by comparing the demographic characteristics of those responding to the Census to administrative data on legal admissions. While such methods produce reasonably accurate estimates of the illegal population overall, they do not definitively identify individual illegal aliens in the Census. Any efforts to pick out specific individuals are really only educated guesses that would almost certainly not pass constitutional muster with the courts. It is possible to simply ask all respondents if they are illegal aliens, but it seems certain that many, if not most, illegals would probably not identify themselves as such. Trying to exclude illegal aliens or even all non-citizens may seem like a solution to the problem, but doi
