By Staff Reporter |
State Rep. Justin Heap (R-LD10) wants Arizona to conduct its own census excluding illegal immigrants.
Heap proposed the plan through his resolution for a ballot proposal, HCR2058. The resolution would enable the state to have its Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC) or a legislative designee conduct a state census in years ending in zero in order to create legislative districts of equal citizen population. The resolution passed the House last month along party lines and is now working its way through the Senate, with Senate Appropriations scheduled to review the resolution on Tuesday.
“The United States Supreme Court has declined to limit redistricting methods to any single specific population metric and has expressly recognized the permissibility of drawing districts on the basis of eligible voter populations,” states the resolution. “An Arizona specific decennial census of the citizen population will ensure that redistricting determinations are predicated on accurate and current data.”
Should the IRC not complete the state census by Dec. 31 of any year ending in zero, then the IRC would use data from the Census Bureau or a successor agency to determine citizen populations of each legislative district. The resolution would also grant authority to any lawmaker to initiate an action or proceeding to ensure the IRC’s completion of the census and legislative district mapping.
During the House floor vote last month, Heap emphasized that the ballot proposal wouldn’t bind the state to conducting its own census.
“It doesn’t require that we conduct a census: if we don’t either for budgetary reasons or logistical reasons we don’t feel that we can conduct the census on a statewide level, then we just default to the federal as we’ve always done,” said Heap.
Heap further explained during the initial House committee hearing on the bill last month that the federal census has presented a “growing problem” of abstaining from asking about citizenship status.
The Census Bureau didn’t ask about citizenship status in the 2020 Census, after the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to include the question on the form. As a result, the bureau has confirmed that both citizens and illegal immigrants are included in the resident population for the census.
Last year, the Census Bureau announced it would test-run questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in its American Community Survey beginning this year.
Heap blamed the federal government’s alleged poor census-taking for the state not earning its highly anticipated tenth congressional seat in 2020.
“It was widely seen that Arizona was undercounted by the census, resulting in the loss of us receiving another vote,” said Heap. “It’s also widely known that California has two to three additional representative seats in the House that they should not have because noncitizens in California are being counted.”
Heap dismissed the concerns of the cost to the state. He referenced the cost of the last federal census, about $14 billion, for the entire country as indicative that a single-state census wouldn’t cost too much.
“Arizona can do it better, if we choose to,” said Heap.
Last year, Heap posted on X that census records have likely underreported the illegal immigrant population.
“[T]he U.S. census is not the reliable source in determining the undocumented population because that population avoids contact with government and do not cooperate with the census,” said Heap. “So the reported [illegal immigrant] pollution in any census record is just an estimate and is more likely to be heavily under reported.”
Heap also claimed that illegal immigrants usually don’t speak with census workers.
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