Hysteria on Vitter's citizenship question

Republican U.S. senators seldom feel an urge to hug an illegal alien, and our David Vitter may be particularly unlikely to grow misty-eyed over huddled masses.

But the storm of protest that has greeted his proposal to add a citizenship question to next year's Census is beginning to look like mass hysteria.

Civil rights and Latino groups are raising a ruckus, The New York Times has editorialized against him and neither the White House nor the dominant Democrats in Congress will have any truck with him.

Vitter, in cahoots with Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, has held up an appropriation for the Census Bureau with an amendment requiring respondents to be asked whether they are Americans. If they are not, it would make no never mind if they are here illegally. They would not be asked about that.

Why this should be regarded as an affront is a mystery to me, and I happen to know a thing or two about aliens. I used to be one, although I am now as naturalized as apple pie. But I would have been quite happy back then to identify myself as Her Majesty's subject. The Census Bureau only had to ask.

Admittedly, candor is easier for a Limey with a green card than for a worker who crossed the Rio Grande at the dead of night, but illegals are always going to be jittery and reluctant to believe that the Census has nothing to do with immigration enforcement.

Vitter is outnumbered and will no doubt lose in the end, although it is hard to see his amendment, in its current form, as a threat to anyone's civil rights. All aliens, legal or not, would be counted. They would be included in every calculation save the one that determines how congressional seats are allocated among the states.

The proposition that citizens should shape their own democratic institutions does not amount to a recipe for oppression, but Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, accuses Vitter of inflaming "public sentiment against illegal immigration." That sentiment does not in truth require much inflaming and since Vitter's amendment, in its present form, would not even require the Census to probe questions of legality, it is hardly adding fuel to the fire.

Any confusion is largely Vitter's own fault, since his original amendment did propose that such a question be asked. That was pretty dumb, because it would have made illegal aliens even less likely to participate in the count, and Vitter was persuaded to tone it down.

In its current form the amendment not only promotes a fair principle, but is of great practical benefit to several states, including Louisiana, that stand to lose congressional representation if non-citizens continue to be included for purposes of reapportionment. We are the suckers, while such states as Texas and California pack in the aliens and send representatives to Washington by the planeload.

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