PD Editorial: Count the people, not their citizenship

After Congress gave the Census Bureau a needed cash infusion, it was starting to look as if America might pull off the 2020 Census successfully - that was until the Trump administration decided to add an unnecessary and divisive question about citizenship.

The Constitution requires an “actual enumeration” of all people (citizen or not) every 10 years. That count determines how many representatives each state receives, and the data determines the shape of state legislative districts as well as how federal dollars are disbursed. Accuracy matters.

For more than a year, census watchers have warned that the 2020 Census was at risk if Congress didn’t step up with more funding.

Money is especially important this time around as the Census Bureau plans to implement a new online reporting system and needs to test it first. The bureau already has scaled back the tests to just one site in 2018 for lack of funding.

That Congress slipped $2.8 billion into its budget bill last week, nearly doubling last year’s spending, was a welcome surprise.

Any celebration has been short-lived, however.

On Monday night, census officials confirmed that they will include a question asking about citizenship status. Although the Census Bureau has asked about citizenship as part of other surveys for years, it hasn’t been a universal question in the actual decennial census for about 60 years. The courts have long ruled that citizenship is not a factor in deciding how many representatives each state gets.

Rather than produce useful demographic information, the question is far more likely to reduce participation and ensure an inaccurate count. Given the Trump administration’s handling of immigration, the undermining of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s recent tactics, undocumented residents have ample reason to worry that what they tell a census taker might be used against them.

Despite decades of denials by federal officials, a study of government records a decade ago confirmed that the U.S. Census Bureau provided the U.S. Secret Service with names and addresses of Japanese-Americans during World War II, information that led to the internment of more than 110,000 of them.

Inserting the question now for the first time since 1950 is likely to result in thousands refusing to take part, which would undermine the accuracy of the census. That, in turn, would undermine a crucial element of ensuring fairness in our representative form of government.

It’s not just undocumented immigrants who would have to think twice, either. Many legal immigrants in American are not citizens yet or are here on student or work visas. They may choose to avoid the attention of ICE and that of a presidential administration that has been less than inviting to overseas visitors.

If the census misses a large number of immigrants, California and other states with immigrant communities would lose out. Immigrants, legal and undocumented, tend to live in and around cities and in progressive states. According to the Census Bureau’s own survey, about 50,000 Sonoma County residents - 10 percent - are not U.S. citizens. San Francisco and Silicon Valley have even greater concentrations.

It’s certainly no coincidence, then, that an anti-immigrant Republican administration would include a question in the census that could end up undercounting the population in Democratic-leaning urban areas and states, thereby potentially decreasing their political power and increasing the power of rural areas that tend to vote Republican.

Within hours of the announcement, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced a lawsuit challenging the citizenship question. At least 11 other states are expected to take similar action. Once again, the Golden State is taking the lead in opposing a presidential administration that places partisan gain ahead of just about everything - even what should be a simple population count.