The Hill recently published an article on the population estimates just released by the US 2010 Census and quoted Rose Institute Fellow Douglas Johnson discussing the importance of the numbers. Titled “U.S. population could top 313 million in 2010 Census,” the article was published on December 6th.
According to the article, much of this growth was likely caused by immigration, increasing the political power of border states such as Florida, Texas and Arizona when congressional seats are reassigned in the upcoming redistricting process.
While the new projections also show other interesting trends, such as that Hispanics are one of the fastest growing segments of the population, Johnson believes that the “most interesting number to come out of the new estimate was for the country’s total population.” He says:
The national total is interesting, but since the number of seats in the House is set at 435, all that matters for reapportionment is each state’s count relative to the other 49 states. The national total can change, but the size of the House does not…Some of the ethnic and age breakdown data can be looked at to see if it hints at changes in apportionment for states with relatively high concentrations of those ethnicities or ages, but that is stretching the data much farther than it was meant to be stretched, and unlikely to tell us much of use.
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