GOP lawyer: Undocumented migrants aren’t people

According to the U.S Constitution, they aren't suppose to be counted as citizens of this country.

According to the US Constitution, the census counts inhabitants. Not legal residents, not citizens.

AFAIK the count has never been about citizens.

In fact as part of discussions around this the US govts representatives have indeed stated that the concept of "illegal aliens" wasn't really one that existed at the time the US constitution was written.

I stand corrected...

Warning to Anc for revealing dinner’s personal info.

As a point of order, I think there is a serious enough difference between "they are not part of the people" and "they are not people" that the thread title is misleading.

Yes, but that is just camouflage, since the Constitution says to count all people. So the argument here is that by declaring them not part of THE people, they are also no longer treated as what the Constitution considers people.

And we already know that this administration has a fondness for sticking people in cages. If they can strip even more humanity away from immigrants, it’s fairly obvious what the next steps will be.

Thinking that the census is supposed to only count legal citizens is not necessarily the same thing as thinking that non-citizens are subhuman. Both beliefs are mistaken, but the first is reasonable.

I'm not arguing that this particular GOP lawyer or a large swath of the GOP doesn't hold both beliefs, mind.

I don't find it reasonable at all to choose not to count non-citizens. This is how federal funding for certain areas is calculated. Let's just say funding is calculated at $1,000/person. You have 1000 citizens and 100 non-citizens. Would you rather have $1MM or $1.1MM?

Thank you for pointing out a totally irrelevant vaguely related pure hypothetical that absolutely nobody disagrees with, though. It's a great help!

Raoul is nothing if not careful. He might be killed at any moment.

Otherwise known as LawyerSpeak.

I am saying it is reasonable to be under the mistaken belief that Founding Fathers intended the Census to count only citizens.

... perhaps for a small minority of people. At the time the constitution was written, there weren't any adults who were "citizens". Everyone just lived here. Or they didn't. and that was it. if you didn't live here, you weren't counted. If you did live here, you were.

Sorry ..., no. I still don't know how anyone would think that. Even a small child, prior to learning history, wouldn't know about "citizenship".

No ..., not buying it.

There was definitely a notion of citizenship and non-citizenship in the U.S. at the time of the Constitution. The word "citizen" and variations of it appear multiple times in the document. And although it might vary some with contexts, mere visitors to the U.S. were not citizens. Enslaved people were not considered full-fledged citizens, although they were allowed to be partially counted for Census purposes. Itsy-bitsy babies born of white people in the geographic boundaries of the U.S. were considered citizens.

Yes, all these people were to be counted to some degree in the original Census. I don't blame people for wrongly jumping to the conclusion that the Founding Fathers' intent was solely to count citizens (or for that matter, that we in 2020 should be bound by what the Founding Fathers' intent on this point was), though.

People keep talking about the Founding Fathers but isn’t it really the 14th Amendment that clearly states that all people except untaxed Native Americans (I’m guessing these would be tribes over which the US has no claims of sovereignty over) are to be counted?

The reason I was talking about the Founding Fathers was linked to Jenee's talking about the time the Constitution was written.

The 14th Amendment doesn't specify who is to be counted in the census. It says in the relevant parts that all people who are born in the U.S. or naturalized (and subject to the U.S.'s jurisdiction) are citizens, that citizens can't have their rights deprived except by due proess, can't be denied equal protection of the law, that representatives are proportional to population exculding untaxed Native Americans.

The Census itself is derived from Article I:

People could wrongly jump to the conclusion that "Number of free Persons" refers only to citizens, but that is unsupported by historical practice as I understand, and also undermined by the notion that the Founding Fathers used the term citizen elsewhere and so if they meant "citizens only" they would have said "citizens."

Hypothetically, it seems to me that if there was a drive to pass a law that only citizens should be counted, that would withstand a court challenge. Now it would not be in the best interest of half of Congress to pass such a law. But still...

Why don't you try reading it first?

Doesn’t this:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.

refer to the census as that is the count from which Representatives are to be apportioned? Seems like it is clarifying what is to be counted in the census, all persons (excluding untaxed Native Americans).

He can't even be bothered to read the other posts in this thread explaining it.

Only going off the text without any research into what that part means:

Not necessarily, because the figure used in this calculation is not necessarily supposed to be the same as the census overall. It could be that the census counts all people and then the tally used for the determination of calculating how many representatives each gets is a subset of that. I would imagine that the censuses back in the day had a figure for untaxed Native Americans, as opposed to just not counting them at all.

Also, it doesn't do anything more to resolve the misguided notion that the census was only to count citizens. I could see someone thinking the change in language actually causing the flipside: in better defining citizenship and granting it to everyone actually born in the U.S., it makes the number of people who are non-citizens much much smaller both as an absolute number and as a proportion to the citizens as of the 1780s.

I'd say the crucial part is where it says excluding Indians not taxed.

Given that undocumented people often still pay tax, seems in line with intent to count them.

I'm purely guessing, but I'd think it likely that the reasons the "Indians not taxed" clause was in there is because the overlap between Native Americans who lived in areas not subject to federal or state taxes and Native Americans who were non-U.S. citizens was pretty close to 80-90 percent.

The census is to count all people. The history and precedent over the past two centuries is crystal clear.

We're arguing over whether water is really wet. This is asinine and it's proponents are working in bad faith to try and cling to power in a country that is starting to reject them in overwhelming numbers.

Correct. If they're not supposed to be here they should not be counted.

#illegalaliens

Sounds like you're attempting to rewrite the US constitution there, didn't take you for one of those fluid interpretation types.

This may be before your time. But did you ever watch Laverne & Shirley, and one of the leads would say something like, "But no one would be stupid enough to do that!" and then Lenny & Squiggy would walk in and be like, "Hello, Laverne!"? Or any other sitcoms like Seinfeld that do something similar?

Your post just before TLS showed up reminded me of that for some reason....