Photo by Gage Skidmore | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
By Laura Gómez | Arizona Mirror
An order President Donald Trump issued last month to exclude immigrants without authorization to live in the country from a population count used to redistribute between states the 435 seated voting members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
In a statement on the July 21 order on apportionment, Trump claimed there’s an effort conceal the number of undocumented immigrants that erodes “the right of American citizens.”
Arizona, which is expected to gain a tenth Congressional seat due to population change, wouldn’t be impacted if unauthorized immigrants are excluded from the count, according to a Pew Research analysis.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates there are 226,000 immigrants residing in Arizona who have no authorization to live in the country, and 65% of them have lived in the U.S. for 10 or more years.
In an analysis of the Trump apportionment order, MPI estimates some 20 million U.S. citizens could be excluded from population counts because determining the immigration status of people requires the intricate sharing of datasets that leave too much room for error.
