Originally posted at ImmPolitic Blog.

One undercurrent to the year-to-year political shenanigans that play out in Congress around the immigration issue is the demographic change that is occurring in the country, officially measured every 10 years by the decennial census. There is a census coming up, in just over four months, and our friends over at America’s Voice have just published a report giving us a little preview on the impact that the growth of the Latino population will have on the number of representatives in Congress that states will have once representation is adjusted to account for population shift that has occurred in the past 10 years.

The report projects that Latinos are responsible for 51% of the growth of the U.S. population since the last census in 2000.

While there are states that will gain representation largely due to the growth in their Latino population, perhaps the more interesting projection is that, in states that are losing population, growth in the Latino population of those states has stemmed their overall population declined.

At the same time that the Latino population is growing in many parts of the country, a trend that is now several decades old continues: Northeast “rust-belt” states (also: cold-winter states) are losing population to sun-belt states, as their population ages and retires, or looks for economic opportunities elsewhere. Latino in-migration is countering some of this loss. Three of the states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, would have lost population were it not for the growth in their Latino population. Louisiana will register a population decline, but that decline has been mitigated by growth in the Latino population.

What impact might these population shifts have on the immigration debate?

It is expected that eight states will gain representation in Congress, while eleven states will lose. However, even in states where the growth in the Latino population will lead to more representation for the state, the political influence of Latinos will be mitigated by the politics of re-districting. New congressional districts will be drawn to account for the re-distribution of the population. In most states, the drawing of new districts is controlled by the state legislature, and the party in power tends to draw districts in such a way as to include a majority of voters that will vote for the party in power. As the report notes,

“Republicans are poised to control the redistricting process in most of the states poised to gain seats in the U.S. House.”

Given that, in recent years, Latinos have become more Democratic, we can expect that districts will be drawn to dilute the Latino vote in many of these states. This gerrymandering, however, can only go so far. As the report notes:

When drawing new Congressional borders following the 2000 Census, the Republican-controlled Texas legislature “moved” 100,000 citizens from the majority Latino Congressional District 23 to Congressional District 25 in order to protect a District 23 incumbent who was out of favor with Latinos.

The effort was struck down by the Supreme Court, which judged the resulting dilution of Latino votes a violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Other trends will also lessen the impact of Latino population growth. In Arizona, while there has been growth in the Latino population, the share of the electorate that is Latino has declined.

On the other hand, other factors will magnify the impact of Latino population growth. In the mostly northern states that will be losing representation, Latino population growth combined with the out-migration of non-Latinos will mean a greater share of the electorate will be Latino, and most of those states are controlled by Democratic legislatures.

Finally, superimposed on all of the population shifts is the political shift that, if it continues, will magnify the Latino voice in the immigration debate. The Republican Party, thanks to the prominence of its extreme voices in the immigration debate, has been driving Latinos into the Democratic camp.

How all of these long-term trends ultimately play out will be something to watch. One can certainly hope that, if nothing else does, these long-term trends will slowly erode away the logjam in Congress.

By Wendy Sefsaf. Originally posted at Immigration Impact.

By now, we’ve grown accustomed to Senators attempting to score political points at home through anti-immigration amendments, regardless of the topic of the underlying bill. Still, Senator David Vitter’s amendment to the Commerce, Justice and State appropriations legislation, which would cut off financing for the 2010 Census unless the survey includes questions about immigration status, is pretty convoluted—especially for a politician from a state still struggling to recover from the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.

Despite the fact that the census is a constitutionally mandated count of all people in the U.S.—irrespective of immigration status—this amendment isn’t about getting a more accurate or more differentiated count. It plays on GOP fears that redistricting based on the census count might shift the balance of power in Congress if undocumented immigrants are counted. Everyone, however, should be afraid if undocumented immigrants are not counted because of state and local budget ramifications—ramifications that echo all the louder as people around the country struggle to recover from one of the worst economic downturns in decades.

The Drum Major Institute’s Afton Branche writes in “The Next Economic Imperative: Undocumented Immigrants in the 2010 Census.”

Failing to gather accurate information about an estimated 12 million undocumented residents will make it too difficult for the country to recover from the worst recession in decades: local and state governments won’t receive adequate funding for public services; businesses will be discouraged from investing in new markets and creating jobs in growing communities; costly mistakes will be made in infrastructure, education, and healthcare because of incomplete demographic data.

In addition to the plausible losses to local governments, the cost of changing forms and databases so late in the game was reported in the New York Times:

The Commerce Department says that redoing the survey would cost hundreds of millions of dollars: to rewrite and reprint hundreds of millions of census forms, to revise instructional and promotional material and to reprogram software and scanners.

And finally eight former Directors of the U.S. Census Bureau (under both Republican and Democratic Administrations) wrote a statement outlining how detrimental a change would be to the process right now:

Research, testing, design, planning and preparation for a Decennial Census are an enormous challenge. By the fall before the census starts, the process is on “auto-pilot”: final questionnaires are running off the presses, local census offices are opening and preparing to recruit and train hundreds of thousands of census takers, and paid media is ready to launch….Less than six months before census day and only several months before the counts starts, is not the time to place a decade of careful and demanding preparations at risk.

Play all this out in the state of Louisiana, a place that knows a thing or two about the need for federal dollars and an accurate count of who is actually living there. Try to imagine having totally inaccurate data on the people of New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina and you start to get a picture of the kinds of problems we face when altering the census. It all comes back to the fact that until we deal with immigration on its own terms, politicians will attempt to twist, turn and contort immigration amendments to their own ends—regardless of the impact it will have on their constituents—as long as it makes a good sound bite about illegal immigration.

Photo by Christine & Eric.