<strong>St. Louis Post-Dispatch (TNS)</strong>
The Trump administration’s decision to include a citizenship question in the 2020 Census smacks of an effort to intimidate immigrants and reduce the congressional representation of districts with heavy non-citizen populations. That said, it’s not altogether a bad question to ask, along with others that help demographers provide more accurate statistical breakdowns of the U.S. population.
Because of President Donald Trump’s record on immigration, the citizenship question is now a hot button issue. Critics charge the question is motivated by the president’s desire to uproot or de-legitimize non-citizens. They believe the question would discourage census participation and increase fears by undocumented immigrants — who must also be counted — that it’s a government ploy to hunt them down.
The Census Bureau is banned by law from sharing respondents’ answers with anyone. “Not the IRS, not the FBI, not the CIA, and not with any other government agency,” the bureau says. Since California and other states are filing legal challenges, the courts probably will decide whether the question stays in the 2020 questionnaire.
No decennial census since 1950 has asked about citizenship. The Census Bureau’s less-accurate American Community Survey, done yearly, does ask the question, along with others about respondents’ birth countries and when foreign-born respondents arrived here. The decennial census also asks details about race and whether Hispanics are of Cuban, Mexican or other descent.
Yet those questions, approved by the Obama and Bush administrations, didn’t prompt an outcry.
The “sole, sinister purpose” of the 2020 citizenship question “is to suppress the response rate from minorities and new immigrants to counter the growing political power of the non-white population,” Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis, stated recently.
It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint which questions, including citizenship, cause respondents to bolt. The Census Bureau says it gets similarly high non-response rates when the question is about educational attainment or monthly gas costs. Oddly, the question with the highest non-response rate is: Do you purchase annual property insurance?
Because the citizenship question already is in the annual community surveys, we know that more than half of America’s foreign-born residents are not citizens, and foreign-born residents make up 13.2 percent of the overall population. As for the oft-cited figure that 11 million undocumented immigrants reside in America, that’s pure guesswork. Nobody knows for sure.
Trump’s critics assume that blue states like California, with a 27 percent foreign-born population, would be most heavily affected if the citizenship question prompts lower response rates. But solid-red Texas and Florida, with high foreign-born populations, also could suffer.
So far, the administration has done a lousy job of explaining its motivation. Given Trump’s harsh record on immigration, we can only suspect the worst, which is why federal court is the best place to force all sides to argue their positions — with facts, not hunches or emotions.
