Why Is California A Sanctuary State?

As most people know, California insists that it is a sanctuary state. Why are they doing this?  Many cities in California have areas that have become literal cesspools from the large numbers of homeless there.  Their sanitation needs are not met by standard state-of-the-art sanitation procedures.  Some cities have “poop” patrols to clean up the streets from the poop and other unsanitary items put there by homeless people.  Third world diseases are now beginning to show up.  Los Angeles has a typhus problem which appears to be spreading.  Due to the shortage of housing, encouraging more illegals to go there just exacerbates the problem.

There is an old saying that one should “follow the money” if you want to know why seemingly rational people would pursue what appears to be a irrational course of action.  And in this case that certainly appears to be true.

Money for many Federal programs is apportioned to the states based on the number of residents in the state, not the number of citizens.  The more residents that a state has, the more money that it receives from the Federal Government.  This is particularly true for means-tested programs.  That is, programs that distribute money based on the incomes of the people who apply for such programs.

Once again California has a budget shortfall.  As usual, it is in the billions of dollars.  They need all the money that they can siphon from Washington.

However, there is another less obvious reason for trying to attract more illegals to California.  It has to do with power.  It has to do with how the seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned.

This comes back to the Democrats’ 1^stCommandment.

Courtesy…Dee Chadwell…American Thinker

Apportionment is the process of dividing the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives among the 50 states.  The apportionment calculation is based upon the total resident population (citizens and non-citizens) of the 50 states.  Each state automatically gets one seat. The remaining seats are apportioned according to the population of the individual state based on a law passed in 1941. Please note that non-citizens are included in the population counts.  So, states with relatively large numbers of non-citizens including illegal aliens will get more representatives in the House.

Currently each House member represents approximately three quarters of a million residents in states with more than one member.  As noted by Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies in 2003, apportionment of seats is significantly impacted by the presence of non-citizens.

This also affects the Electoral College since the apportionment of electors is based on the same calculations.  Camarota also noted that states that lost representation did NOT decline in population.

The question here is should House representation reflect residents or citizens?  Should states whose populations are 97% or 98% citizens be losing representation because some states are increasing their resident counts by the influx of illegal immigrants?  In California 1 in 7 is a non-citizen.  They currently have 53 seats in the House.  This translates into 7 to 8 seats more than if representation was based just on citizens.

This results in creating situations where it skews the number of votes needed to elect a House member.  In California it takes only 68,000 votes to elect a House member on average.  In states with low numbers of non-citizens, it takes more than 100,000 votes to elect a House member on average.  In unusual situations where there are a large number of non-citizens, it can take as few as 35,000 votes to seat a member of the House.

Is this fair?  Does this violate the “One Man, One Vote” doctrine enshrined in different rulings of the Supreme Court mostly during the 1960’s?  Should states like California who encourage lawless behavior be rewarded with more seats in the House?  Is it time to review the 1941 law in view of the changed circumstances in the country?

It certainly seems that California’s approach might be different if representation in the House and Federal monies going to entitlement programs were based on the number of citizens and not the number of residents.