Numerous cities have declared themselves to be “sanctuary cities,” where local police are forbidden to cooperate with federal immigration authorities in enforcing our national immigration laws. Legislation is now moving through the California legislature to implement such a policy throughout that entire state. Why this energy to protect violators of our laws? Oddly, the answer goes back to the founding. Due to a residue of the notorious three-fifth compromise, sanctuary cities encourage illegal immigration because undocumented residents (to use the politically correct term) are counted in determining representation in the House of Representatives and state legislatures. The more undocumented a city has, the more seats it gets.
When the Framers were deciding how to apportion the House of Representatives, the southern states wanted to count slaves and the northern states wanted to only count free citizen residents. They compromised by counting three-fifths of the non-free population. To implement this, the House is apportioned on the basis of the gross total population rather than the citizen population. As illegal immigration was not a great issue in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment simply carried forward this practice. As a result, the Census Bureau explicitly includes both legal non-citizen and undocumented residents in the census.
In our era of historically high immigration, this has a major impact on legislative apportionment because these immigrants are very unevenly distributed. ...
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