other legal immigrants—are, with limited exceptions, ineligible to receive benefits through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, and State Children’s Health Insurance Program for 5 years after entry into the United States (8 U.S.C. 1613(a)). Aliens who are not “qualified aliens,” such as those unlawfully present, are generally ineligible for Federal benefits and for State and local benefits (8 U.S.C. 1611(a), 1621(a)).
The lack of accurate information about the total citizen population makes it difficult to plan for annual expenditures on certain benefits programs. And the lack of accurate and complete data concerning the alien population makes it extremely difficult to evaluate the potential effects of proposals to alter the eligibility rules for public benefits.
Third, data identifying citizens will help the Federal Government generate a more reliable count of the unauthorized alien population in the country. Data tabulating both the overall population and the citizen population could be combined with records of aliens lawfully present in the country to generate an estimate of the aggregate number of aliens unlawfully present in each State. Currently, the Department of Homeland Security generates an annual estimate of the number of illegal aliens residing in the United States, but its usefulness is limited by the deficiencies of the citizenship data collected through the American Community Survey alone, which includes substantial margins of error because it is distributed to such a small percentage of the population.
Academic researchers have also been unable to develop useful and reliable numbers of our illegal alien population using currently available data. A 2018 study by researchers at Yale University estimated that the illegal alien population totaled between 16.2 million and 29.5 million. Its modeling put the likely number at about double the conventional estimate. The fact is that we simply do not know how many citizens, non-citizens, and illegal aliens are living in the United States.
Accurate and complete data on the illegal alien population would be useful for the Federal Government in evaluating many policy proposals. When Members of Congress propose various forms of protected status for classes of unauthorized immigrants, for example, the full implications of such proposals can be properly evaluated only with accurate information about the overall number of unauthorized aliens potentially at issue. Similarly, such information is needed to inform debate about legislative proposals to enhance enforcement of immigration laws and effectuate duly issued removal orders.
The Federal Government’s need for a more accurate count of illegal aliens in the country is only made more acute by the recent massive influx of illegal immigrants at our southern border. In Proclamation 9822 of November 9, 2018 (Addressing Mass Migration Through the Southern Border of the United States), I explained that our immigration and asylum system remains in crisis as a consequence of the mass migration of aliens across our southern border. As a result of our broken asylum laws, hundreds of thousands of aliens who entered the country illegally have been released into the interior of the United States pending the outcome of their removal proceedings. But because of the massive backlog of cases, hearing dates are sometimes set years in the future and the adjudication process often takes years to complete. Aliens not in custody routinely fail to appear in court and, even if they do appear, fail to comply with removal orders. There are more than 1 million illegal aliens who have been issued final removal orders from immigration judges and yet remain at-large in the United States.
Efforts to find solutions that address the immense number of unauthorized aliens living in our country should start with accurate information that allows us to understand the true scope of the problem.
Fourth, it may be open to States to design State and local legislative districts based on the population of voter-eligible citizens. In Evenwel v. Abbott, 136 S. Ct. 1120 (2016), the Supreme Court left open the question whether “States may draw districts to equalize voter-eligible population rather than
