Sponsors (67)
The bill offers clearer citizenship-based apportionment rules and more granular citizenship data for governments and researchers, but at the risk of reduced census participation, privacy harms, legal/administrative costs, and diminished representation and funding for immigrant-heavy communities.
Federal apportionment actors (the President and Clerk of the House) and federal/state officials will have clearer statutory instructions on which population to use for apportionment, reducing ambiguity about counting noncitizens.
States with higher shares of citizens could gain additional U.S. House seats and Electoral College votes, increasing their political representation.
State and local governments will receive counts by citizenship status soon after the census, giving officials more detailed population data for planning and resource allocation.
Immigrant communities (including undocumented people) are likely to be less willing to respond to the census, risking lower participation and undercounts that harm representation and funding for those areas.
States and communities with large noncitizen populations could lose U.S. House seats and Electoral College votes, reducing their political influence.
Communities with many noncitizen residents may receive less federal funding and reduced representation in redistricting, harming public services and local political voice.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Adds a citizenship-status question to the 2030 census and thereafter and restricts apportionment counts to U.S. citizens beginning with the 2030 apportionment.
Introduced January 3, 2025 by Chuck Edwards · Last progress January 3, 2025
Requires the Census Bureau to add a citizenship-status question to the 2030 decennial census and every decennial census thereafter, asking whether each person is a U.S. citizen, a U.S. national but not a citizen, an alien lawfully residing in the U.S., or an alien unlawfully residing in the U.S., and directs the Secretary of Commerce to publish state-level counts by those four categories within 120 days after each census. Changes the federal apportionment calculation so that only U.S. citizens are counted for allocating House seats and Electoral College votes, beginning with the apportionment that follows the 2030 census; includes a severability clause to keep the rest of the law in effect if any part is invalidated.