Census Nonsense

Once you get into estimates of how many extra seats go to which states things quickly get complicated, and controversial. California, for example, according to John Baker and Elliot Stonecipher, a lawyer and a demographer, will get an extra nine seats from the 2010 Census that it otherwise would not have if non-citizens were not counted. (Note that Baker and Stonecipher are working with absolute numbers, a different calculation than incremental changes from Census to Census. Thus, their estimate includes many decades of Census results.) Their essay drew a considerable amount of fire. I happen to think that their estimate is not unreasonable, but there's clearly room for argument. If you have an appetite for numbers you could do your own back of the envelope calculations for California, or, indeed, for Texas, Florida, and New York... The point, however, seems to me irrefutable: these are non-trivial shifts.

Our op-ed outlines the main arguments — obviously, many others could immediately be brought to bear. But liberals, and Democrats, and everybody else, should consider this problem from another critical perspective as well. Cheap, illegal labor makes it difficult, if not impossible, to establish a living minimum wage. Or, for that matter, a decent scale up the wage ladder. Or viable unions. And if you're concerned about the dismal state of American social services, you have to ask, for example, whether it's really reasonable to believe that we could have both socialized health care and effectively unlimited illegal immigration? To me, the answer is clearly no.

The late, great, liberal black congresswoman from Texas, Barbara Jordan, understood that we cannot afford not to control immigration. A few black scholars today, like Clarence Jones (a close associate of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.), follow in that tradition. But their reasonableness gets drowned out by the fervor of the anti-anti-illegal activists. The issue thus is cast — simplistically and mistakenly — as one of white 'nativists' versus people of color. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you want a realistic, fair solution to our immigration problem it's got to have two parts. Most of those illegals already here must have a path to citizenship. And the illegal door must be closed, permanently. The thing is, you can't do the one without the other simultaneously.

I think — and I hate to say this — Chris Matthews is right: the Republicans want the cheap labor and the Democrats want the votes, so neither intends to budge on real reform.

But my guess, also, is that without reforming the Census, first, we're far less likely to get to the other policy issues.