By Vince Phillips
This self-reinforcing cycle is the heart of gerrypandering. Every ten years the Census Bureau counts every person living in the United States, citizen or not. Those raw population numbers determine how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state receives, and how billions in federal funding are distributed.
The Incentive is Massive
- Including non-citizens in the 2020 census shifted roughly 17 House seats nationwide.
- States with large illegal immigrant populations gained or protected extra representation and hundreds of billions in federal money.
- Over $2 trillion per year in federal programs are allocated in part based on these counts.
The Replacement Strategy in Action
Sanctuary states and cities have been losing American citizens for years through out-migration. California alone lost over 229,000 net domestic migrants in recent years. Those departing productive citizens are steadily replaced by new arrivals, many of them illegal immigrants drawn by sanctuary policies, benefits, and lax enforcement.
What This Means for Chaffee County
While Denver and Boulder swell their census counts with non-citizens, rural counties like Chaffee get diluted. Our 4th Congressional District becomes just a little smaller voice in Washington because urban areas are artificially inflating their numbers. Every time a new arrival is counted in a sanctuary city, it helps shift one more sliver of political power and federal funding away from places like Buena Vista, Salida, and Poncha Springs. We still pay our full share of taxes, but our influence gets weaker while the very policies harming us get stronger.
Floating Unfunded Liabilities
These same blue strongholds carry enormous pension and entitlement obligations. More warm bodies on the census rolls = more federal aid flowing to them, often subsidized in part by taxpayers in rural Colorado.
The Perfect Gerrypandering Loop
- Pass sanctuary policies and generous benefits
- Attract large numbers of illegal immigrants
- Census counts them → gain extra congressional seats and federal dollars
- Use the newly gained power and money to double down on the same policies
- Mobilize sincere anti-ICE protesters and sanctuary advocates to shield the operation from scrutiny and paint any opposition as heartless
This isn’t compassion. It isn’t humanitarianism.
It’s one of the oldest cons in politics, dressed up in the language of virtue. Democratic leaders who just a few short years ago solemnly declared that we “must secure the border” now act as if flooding the country with millions of illegal immigrants, and forcing American taxpayers to foot the bill, is the great moral crusade of our time.
They pretend they’re doing it to help the newcomers. In reality, they’re using everyone: the migrants as political pawns, the taxpayers as unwitting funders, the sincere protesters as human shields, and rural communities like Chaffee County as collateral damage. They assume we’re too stupid to notice the switcheroo.
This is not kindness. It is a cold, calculated business model called gerrypandering, importing a new electorate, inflating the census, and rigging the political map for a generation… all at the direct expense of the very citizens who built this country.
Support Independent Local Journalism — High Country Advocate was created as a real alternative to regional media that too often silences dissenting voices while taking sides in the political struggle. Producing in-depth, unflinching reporting like this series and others is expensive: servers, editing, research time, and legal review all add up quickly. If these articles have informed you or given you new perspective, please consider supporting HCA with a paid subscription — every subscriber helps keep this reporting strong and independent.
