Monday, March 13, 2006

Solution to Illegal Immigrants

If everyone was really interested in solving the “Illegal” immigrant problem, the Constitution would have to be amended. Right now States that have large populations of these “Illegals” benefit from the Constitutional requirement that a census be taken every ten years. Both the number of seats in the House of Representatives and the number of Electoral College votes a state has are determined by this count of the “population”. No mentions of a residence status or voting privileges are listed as prerequisites.
The amendment(s) should state that during the census, the legal residential status of each individual counted must be determined and the number of Electoral College votes a state possess should be based on its number of registered voters. After all, why should a state benefit from the count of its population if that population cannot determine the outcome of the presidential election? Additionally, if determining the legal residence of a person cannot be accomplished, then the number of House of Representatives could also just be determined by the number of registered voters as well. Since Congressmen are representing their constituents and the definition of constituent is:” noun: a member of a constituency; a citizen who is represented in a government by officials for whom he or she votes”, then why base the number of House of Representatives on non-voters?
The number of both should be set after the deadline for registering to vote in a presidential election. That way the numbers are dynamically updated every four years instead of every ten years. This seems a more equitable procedure to me and it might provide states like California, New York, New Mexico, etc, with some incentive to actually control the legality of their population’s immigration status. Right now, they derive benefits from “Illegals”, so they don’t mind their presence.

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