Senate kills census citizenship amendment

By Ed O'Keefe





Sens. David Vitter (R-La.) and Robert Bennett (R-Utah) wanted the Census Bureau to ask about citizenship status next year.

Updated 2:28 p.m. ET

The Senate voted Thursday to block a Republican attempt to require the Census Bureau to ask people for their citizenship status during next year's decennial census.

Lawmakers voted 60 to 39 to effectively kill an amendment by Sens. David Vitter (R-La.) and Robert Bennett (R-Utah) that would have excluded illegal immigrants from population totals used to apportion Congressional seats in each state. The pair argued that the high numbers of illegal immigrants in larger, heavily-urbanized states would mean that at least nine other states would lose Congressional seats following next year's census. The proposed amendment would have been added to the 2010 Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Bill.

Several immigration and civil rights advocacy groups said the proposal would lead to a severe undercount of Hispanics and other immigrant groups fearful of potential punishment. The Census Bureau warned that passage of the amendment would add billions of dollars in costs to the 2010 Census to print new forms and retrain workers. By law, the decennial census counts the actual number of people living in the United States, without regard to citizenship status.

Critics also noted that the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment, states that "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state." (Emphasis added.)

"We commend the Senate for standing up for the Constitution and for sparing the nation from the damage the amendment would have done to the Census and to the civil rights of millions of people -- both native-born and immigrant -- who would have been discouraged from being counted had the amendment passed," said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. "We also hope that today's vote sends a strong message that the Senate is committed to a 2010 census in which every person counts and every person is counted.”

The Service Employees International Union had also opposed the measure, arguing it might have scared several of its members to not fill out census forms. SEIU Executive Vice President Eliseo Medina applauded the Senate's move, calling the Vitter-Bennett amendment a "misguided attempt to undercut 2010 enumeration efforts and mar this critical process with hateful, anti-immigrant politics."

By law, the decennial census only counts the actual number of people living in the United States and does not account for citizenship.

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