(Washington) Donald Trump on Tuesday ordered not to count illegal aliens to establish the representativeness of the various states in the US Congress, relaunching his offensive against illegal immigration and the sensitive debate on citizenship.
Posted on 21 July 2020 at 16 h 30
France Media Agency
The American census, carried out every ten years, counts the entire population present in the territory, including the homeless, residents of retirement homes, undocumented immigrant workers or those living in mobile homes or without a postal address.
Mr. Trump said in a statement that he refused to “give parliamentary representation to foreigners who enter or remain in this country illegally, because that would create perverse incentives and undermine our system of government.”
“As we do not give political power to people who are here temporarily, we should not (in) give to people who should not be here”, he assured.
The census operations, a titanic exercise in a country of 327 million inhabitants, condition the granting of 675 billions of dollars in federal grants and determine the number of seats allocated to each state in the House of Representatives, based on its population.
The Republican billionaire, who has made the fight against illegal immigration a marker of his presidency, accused the “radical left” of wanting to erase the concept of nationality and “hide the number of illegal foreigners in our country. country ”.
The subject also galvanizes the electoral base of the president, who will seek a new mandate in November.
The powerful civil rights organization ACLU described this decision as “contrary to the Constitution” and promised to take legal action.
The leader of the Democrats in Congress, Nancy Pelosi, accused Mr. Trump of wanting to “once again instill fear and mistrust within vulnerable and traditionally under-counted communities”.
The Supreme Court ruled illegal last year the government's decision to ask for the nationality of census participants, a question that had not been asked for more than 60 years.
This could have pushed between 1.6 and 6.5 million immigrants to abstain or to lie on the questionnaire for fear, especially among undocumented migrants, of being spotted, according to the census office .
Between 07 and 10 millions people resided illegally in the United States in 2017, according to an estimate by the American research center Pew.
