Last Thursday, Congressman Mo Brooks, R-Huntsville, announced that he was attending depositions of Census employees in the lawsuit that he and the State of Alabama have filed challenging congressional reapportionment based on the number of people who live in the U.S. Brooks and Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R) contend that it should be based instead on the number of citizens in the country.
“As part of the State of Alabama and my lawsuit against the Census Bureau’s practice of including illegal aliens in congressional apportionment, I attended a deposition today at the Department of Commerce. Alabama will lose a congressional seat and an electoral college vote if illegal aliens are included in the count for reapportionment of Congressional seats and electoral college votes,” Brooks said. “As such, the voting rights of Alabama citizens will be illegally diluted and the ‘one-man, one vote’ rights of Alabama citizens will be unconstitutionally denied. I’m fighting in court to ensure that doesn’t happen!”
The United States takes in more legal immigrants than any other nation in the world, with over 1.1 million legal immigrants entering this country legally each year. On top of that there are millions of illegal immigrants in this country. About half of those entered the country legally and then overstayed their visa.
If the reapportionment is based on the total population in each state, then states like Florida, Texas, and California who are more popular with immigrants will receive larger shares of the 435 Congressional seats when Congress reapportions after the 2020 Census. This will be at the expense of states like Alabama who have had a more difficult time recruiting legal and illegal immigrants. According to the American Immigration Council, 27 percent of the population of the State of California is foreign born. Of those approximately half have become naturalized citizens; but half of that number are non-citizens, many of them here in violation of our immigration laws.
Brooks and the State of Alabama contend that those states with higher numbers of non-citizens should not receive congressional reapportionment and the corresponding electoral college votes based off raw population. This case is presently in federal court.
Alabama has grown in the last decade, but not at the rate of the rest of the country. Most of the population growth in this country is due to immigration as the American birth rate has actually been in decline. Alabama presently has seven congressional districts. If the reapportionment is based on total population the state is expected to lose a congressional district in 2022 to six.
The population of the United States was 327.2 million in 2018. From 1955 to 2018 the U.S. population has doubled. The population of Alabama was 4.888 million persons in 2018. The Alabama population has doubled since 1922. The state has grown and is growing (about 14,750 a year since 2010), but not at the rate of the nation. Florida has 21.3 million people. Their population has doubled since 1981. Alabama was actually more populous than Florida was in 1950.
California’s population has doubled since 1969. Texas’s population has doubled since 1979. New York, on the other hand, is in the same predicament as Alabama. Their population actually dropped about 48,000 people from July 1 2017 to July 1, 2018, with almost 40,000 of those losses coming in New York City. New York has experienced much slower growth than Alabama over much of the twentieth century and will also lose a congressional district and possibly two in the next reapportionment. Florida surpassed New York in population in 2013 to become the third most populous state. Illinois is also expected to finish the decade with negative population growth and will lose a congressional seat.
Congressman Mo Brooks is presently serving in his fifth term representing Alabama’s Fifth Congressional District.
