Cartoon by Jimmy Margulies

The citizenship question on the 2020 census, explained

Vox : The US Census Bureau announced on Monday night that the 2020 census will ask every American household to record which members of their family are US citizens. 

Only a few hours later, it was facing a lawsuit over the decision. A group of 14 states, led by California, are trying to force the government to back down and leave the citizenship question off the census when it goes out to American households two years from now.

The government’s justification for the question sounds simple enough: Asking about citizenship will provide more information about who is in the United States, and more information is always good. It claims it’s simply reinstating a question that’s been part of every census except 2010’s.

But the critics are skeptical that the Trump administration intends to use citizenship data for good reasons. The not-so-subtle implication, critics say, is that that it’s part of a broader project by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and company to take America back to the pre-civil rights era. 

It’s not just a symbolic issue. Critics are seriously concerned that adding a single citizenship question to the 2020 census could scare away millions of immigrants from filling out their mandatory surveys — throwing off the count of who’s present in America that’s used to determine congressional apportionment for the next decade, allocate federal funding for infrastructure, and serve as the basis for huge amounts of American research.

A skewed census would hurt the places in America where Latinos are most likely to live — cities and blue states — fueling both the lawsuit and the suspicion that the Trump administration is engaging in deliberate subterfuge.

The concern was real even before the citizenship question was added. Last year, a bureau researcher flagged to a census advisory committee that focus groups and field tests were having serious problems getting immigrants to complete the survey.

During one field test, a respondent fled her home when she started getting worried about the questions. Another family moved abruptly after an interview with a census employee, and others halted the questions or deliberately lied. 

Three years ago, researchers said, they hadn’t had problems like this. But now, one respondent told an interviewer, “the possibility that the census could give my information to internal security and immigration could come and arrest me for not having documents terrifies me.”

The government can’t actually do that. Federal law strictly prohibits the Census Bureau from sharing information. But under Trump, it’s really hard for any government official to persuade immigrants — or US-born Latinos — that she can be trusted to protect them. 

Adding an explicit citizenship question makes the challenge that much harder. And if the 2020 census fails, it could throw Congress’s representation for the next decade — and our understanding of who exactly lives in America — entirely off-kilter.

The census is one of those rare parts of American life that is actually mandated by the Constitution — right at the top. In the 230 or so years since the Constitution was written, social science has developed sophisticated ways to estimate populations without literally counting every single person. But the Constitution still requires an “actual enumeration” to determine how many members of Congress each state will get, so that’s what the census does:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers [...] The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative [...]

As the Supreme Court has ruled, that means the census can’t use any statistical modeling or estimation to fill in the gaps if it’s worried that not enough people have turned in their forms. But the Census Bureau collects a lot of data that goes beyond the basic mandatory every-10-year count — information that then gets used for congressional funding allotments, as the basis for other federal and academic research, in carving up congressional districts within a state, and in deciding the total number of Congress members the state gets. And for all those purposes, Congress, in 1976, amended the Census Act to encourage the government to use demographic sampling to collect data >>>