The Census Bureau is proposing new 2030 Census residence rules that would count U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents for congressional apportionment while excluding illegal immigrants and most other foreign nationals without permanent status.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
The Trump administration proposed a major change Wednesday to the population count used to divide seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, seeking to exclude illegal immigrants and most foreign nationals without permanent resident status from the 2030 Census apportionment totals.
Under the Census Bureau’s proposed rule, U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents would be included in the population used to allocate House seats among the states. Other foreign citizens, including people living in the country illegally and many people lawfully present on temporary visas, would not be included in the apportionment count. The proposal is scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on Sept. 10 and will be subject to a 30-day public comment period.
Because each state’s Electoral College representation consists of its House delegation plus two senators, any change in congressional apportionment could also change the distribution of electoral votes after the 2030 Census.
The proposal marks a significant departure from the approach used for the 2020 Census. At that time, foreign citizens living in the United States were generally counted at the residence where they lived and slept most of the time regardless of whether they were present legally, while foreign visitors in the country for vacations or business trips were not counted for apportionment.
The Census Bureau now argues that immigration status should factor into whether someone has a “usual residence” in the United States for apportionment purposes.
“In particular, the Census Bureau finds merit in the interpretive argument outlined above and has preliminarily determined that, under the best reading of the Constitutional mandate, illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, as they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ‘usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States,” the proposed rule states.
The agency offered a second legal basis for the change, saying it had “preliminarily determined, after revisiting and reviewing the applicable law, that excluding illegal aliens (among others) from the apportionment count is a lawful and appropriate exercise of the Census Bureau’s discretion under 13 U.S.C. 141, Franklin v. Massachusetts, and all other applicable law.”
The proposed regulation would go beyond excluding only people in the country illegally. Its operative language states that foreign citizens who are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents would be counted, while “all other citizens of foreign countries” would not be counted for apportionment. The bureau is requesting public comment on whether some other forms of legal status should be treated similarly to permanent residency.
The administration’s interpretation is expected to face legal challenges. The 14th Amendment directs that House seats be apportioned according to the “whole number of persons in each State,” and the census historically has not excluded residents from apportionment based on immigration status. The Supreme Court did not decide the underlying legality of President Donald Trump’s 2020 effort to exclude immigrants in the country illegally from apportionment, instead dismissing that challenge as premature.
The political consequences of counting noncitizens have been examined by the Center for Immigration Studies, which reported in 2024 that noncitizens are distributed unevenly among congressional districts and that districts with higher noncitizen populations generally contain fewer voting-age citizens.
CIS emphasized that its findings were not evidence of illegal voting.
“This reflects the fact that the voters who live around non-citizens tend to be Democrats, who end up having more voting power due to the presence of a large number of non-citizens,” the researchers wrote. “This is not evidence of non-citizens voting.”
The organization found an association between the noncitizen share of a district and its partisan vote. In the 2022 election, each percentage-point increase in the noncitizen share of a district’s adult population was associated with a 1.8 percentage-point increase in the Democratic share of the two-party vote, according to the report’s analysis. CIS again cautioned that the finding did not indicate noncitizens were voting.
Download: Voting Data by District
The report said the 13 House districts with the largest noncitizen shares had approximately the same combined number of voting-age U.S. citizens as the nine districts with the smallest noncitizen shares, despite receiving four more representatives, a comparison CIS attributed partly to differences in noncitizen population. The organization noted that some population differences result from the way House seats are apportioned among states, while congressional districts within individual states generally must contain roughly equal populations.
Among its district-level comparisons, CIS reported that Texas’ 33rd District had about 208,000 fewer voting-age citizens than the state’s 21st District; Florida’s 26th had about 189,000 fewer adult citizens than the 6th; California’s 34th had about 162,000 fewer than the 3rd; and New York’s 6th had about 169,000 fewer than the 21st.
The organization also found that combined turnout in the 10 districts with the highest noncitizen shares was roughly half the total in the 10 districts with the highest citizen shares, according to its turnout comparison. It further reported that winning candidates received about 73% more votes on average in the 54 districts where fewer than 2% of adults were noncitizens than in the 24 districts where at least one-fifth were noncitizens, based on its district analysis.
CIS has separately examined how immigration affects the allocation of House seats among the states and published the district-level data underlying its analysis, along with an audio presentation accompanying the report.
If finalized, the Census Bureau proposal would alter which residents are included in the apportionment population following the 2030 count, potentially changing the distribution of House seats and Electoral College votes among states with differing concentrations of noncitizens. The rule remains a proposal, however, and its ultimate implementation will depend on the federal rulemaking process and likely judicial review.
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