OPINION: Democrats Are Embracing Their Own ‘Foreign Interference’ To Win Elections

Have you heard the news?

It is being reported that California’s junior senator, Kamala Harris, will soon introduce legislation that will lift the ban on illegal aliens working in congressional offices. What a dangerous and hypocritical proposal.

Didn’t Democrats just spend the better part of two years maliciously attacking the President of the United States on a false charge of “collusion” with the citizens of a foreign power? Now, many of these same Democrats, including people running to be the Democratic nominee for President, can’t wait to turn the Halls of Congress over to people who entered our country illegally.

If one really wanted to find those who are enabling “foreign interference” in our government, one would need to look no further than those who support the Harris legislation.

While the effort to give illegal aliens the ability to work for Members of Congress is shocking in its hypocrisy, we really shouldn’t be surprised by it. After all, years of unchecked illegal immigration have already had a tangible effect on Congress. In fact, it could be argued that some Democrats owe the seats they currently hold due to the presence of large illegal immigrant communities within their respective states.

Congressional seats are allocated by population based on data collected every ten years in the U.S. Census. In 2010, the Census Bureau stated that each congressional district contained approximately 710,000 people. Further, because the number of congressional seats is fixed at 435 in the House of Representatives, population shifts mean that some states will gain representation while other states will lose seats.

In my home state of Iowa, we lost a seat following reapportionment in 2010, going from five congressional districts to four. This is in line with trends which see the Midwest and the Northeast continuing to lose congressional representation to states in the South and the West. While Iowa was losing a seat in 2010, many states in the Southwest, such as Arizona, Nevada and Texas, saw gains.

And what is one of the main drivers of population growth in states like Arizona, Nevada, and Texas?

Illegal immigration.

Just last month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced that they had set a dubious record. On March 25, CBP apprehended 4,117 illegal aliens in a single day. Further, the CPB announced that they were on pace for over 100,000 “apprehensions and encounters” with migrants in March, the highest monthly total since 2008.

If the CBP’s current pace were to be sustained, it would take just seven months for them to apprehend an entire congressional district’s worth of people. Imagine if the Democrats were successful in their effort to abolish ICE? Unchecked illegal immigration would essentially be creating a new congressional district every year, just based on the numbers of people we do successfully stop now, and without accounting for those who successfully avoided our border enforcement efforts.  I’m sure it’s purely coincidental that the Nancy Pelosi led House Democrats recently held a vote on legislation that supports illegal immigrant voting in local elections.

What would the nation’s political map look like if the apportionment of congressional seats did not include illegal alien populations?

Senator Harris’s home state of California would be the biggest loser. In 2007, The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimated that California had six congressional seats solely attributable to the number of illegal aliens recorded by the 2000 census.

How does this make sense? Twenty-three states have House delegations with fewer than six members, including Iowa. As it currently stands, California’s illegal alien population arguably has more representation in the United States Congress than American citizens residing in nearly half the states in the nation. As a result, American citizens are seeing their influence in the People’s House consistently diminished as illegal populations grow. In fact, it could even end up being the case that congressional seats attributable to illegal alien populations determine who future House Speakers might be.

Furthermore, because each state’s number of Electoral College voters is determined by combining its total House and Senate delegation, states with large population of alien voters have disproportionate sway in determining the actual outcome of presidential elections every four years.

So if Democrats were serious about stopping “foreign interference” in American elections, they would rush to support President Trump’s national emergency declaration to deal with the crisis illegal immigration is causing on our borders. After all, we should all be able to agree that “foreign nationals” should not have influence over our domestic politics.

But the Democrats won’t do that. Instead, they can’t wait to give congressional jobs (by every definition these are job that Americans WILL do and have always done) to foreign nationals. They’ve gone from shedding crocodile tears over “foreign influence” in our politics to openly seeking to normalize it and capitalize from it if it will help them win future races.

Congressman Steve King represents Iowa as a Republican in the United States House of Representatives.