Steven Camarota - Director of Research, Center For Immigration Studies Joins Houston Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Non citizens voting in the battleground states. How big of
a problem could this be? Joining us to talk about
it is Stephen Camarata, director of research at the Center
for Immigration Studies. Do you have a feel, Stephen, for
how many foreign nationals, non American citizens may be registered
to vote in our battleground states.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Boy, that's a great question that people have answered, you know,
have been asking for a long time. But the bottom
line is, no, we don't. I mean, there has been
some academic research that suggested that non citizen voting could
be significant, but others have said no, that there isn't

(00:39):
good evidence of that. So just the bottom line is
we're not sure. What we can say is there's a
lot of non citizens now in the United States, that
includes illegal immigrants as well as you know, legal immigrants
who haven't naturalized, and if, and that's a big if,
if they voted in any kind of significant numbers, yeah,
they could shift some states because the elections are close.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
There is the proof there somewhere.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
Well, it is true that like say, for example, legal immigrants,
we do have names addresses of legal immigrants and it's
possible those that information could be checked against voter registration
and even you know, people who voted lists, and we
probably could answer this question with a certain level of

(01:31):
you know, we could maybe answer the question at least
for the legal non citizens to see if they're voting,
but we don't do that. The other thing is the
Census Bureau every other year after an election does have
a survey. It doesn't asks people, you know, if they're
citizens and if they voted. The thing is that question
asks the public, which is you know, a very very

(01:54):
large survey. It asks the public first whether they're citizens
and if they say that they're not citizens, and they
don't go on to ask them if they voted. So
if they reverse the order of the question, we might
get at this issue, but they don't do that either.
So the bottom line is it's an open question. We
just don't know, so the rule of law will never apply. Well,

(02:16):
what I would say is there are probably steps we
could take to minimize it and also to study it
more systematically, but we haven't done that, so it's left
with just this big open question. However, at this point
I think that when you make a claim or someone
makes a claim, the non citizen voting is a big deal.

(02:36):
We need to see more proof. At this point, we
don't have that proof.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
You know, I think I can't help, but wonder how
big of a problem proportion But is in all this
I mean states being able to count non citizens as
part of their census. The United States Census Bureau of
not asking that important question and representation being determined by
sheer numbers of population not based on whether they're citizens
of the United States.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Are not right now, that's a good point, right, So
it may surprise your listeners to know that there's absolutely
no question that, say, illegal immigrants send their census forums
back in every ten years, and there was something very
roughly like ten million illegal immigrants in the last census.
And because they're not evenly distributed throughout the country, some

(03:22):
states do gain a state like Texas might gain a seat,
or California, and there's analysis is to suggest that and
given the huge influx of illegal immigrants since twenty twenty one,
we might expect that in the twenty thirty census there's
going to be several more seats that will be distributed
by illegal immigrants and also, yes, several seats that are

(03:44):
re distributed by legal non citizens as well. So you know,
the way the sense of Furer works is it tries
to count everyone. So if you're a foreign student, if
you're a guest worker, it's going to try to count you,
just like it tries to count illegal immigrants. Now, whether
those individuals should be counted, that's a different question, but

(04:05):
at present they are at least in significant numbers, and
so it does redistributed seats.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
There's just no question it does, all right, Steven, thanks
as always appreciated it. Stephen Camarado, Director of Research at
the Center for Immigration Studies. It's five point fifty six