Census strife bursts out in U.S.

History does not truly repeat itself, but it does have a way of popping up, half-recognizable, in funhouse mirrors. Headlines in the U.S. last week were suddenly filled with fears for the integrity of the republic’s 2020 Census, as a group of more than a dozen states, the District of Columbia, and several major cities announced plans to sue the Census Bureau and the federal department in charge of it (Commerce) over the proposed questionnaire disclosed on Easter Monday.

It’s not certain how many states will end up joining the fight, but a filing in the U.S. District Court in New York already lists 17 of them as plaintiffs, and California is undertaking a separate action. This is of obvious interest to a neighbour that experienced its own spasm of census worry a few years back.

The states raising a stir are overwhelmingly “blue,” or Democrat-controlled, in their partisan colour, and this is not a coincidence. The problem is that the Census Bureau is proposing to add a question about the current citizenship status of respondents — something that has not been a feature of the mandatory questionnaire since the decennial census of 1950. It was at about that time that the U.S.A. adopted the census-taking approach Canada still uses: sending a “short form” to every household, but requiring a small random subsample of recipients to fill out a full-monty “long form” sheet with more detailed demographic and economic questions.

Citizenship questions ended up on the long form, but that questionnaire was abandoned altogether after the 2000 census, and the topic of citizenship was moved into the rolling American Community Survey (ACS) — essentially an extensive and continuing mini-census that contacts a sample of about 3.5 million households a year. The U.S. abandonment of the long form did not provoke the outrage that an analogous move by Canada’s Conservative government — since reversed — did in 2011.

The ACS gives American policymakers and researchers data of a depth of which Canadians can only dream. But that is because filling out the ACS is made obligatory in U.S. law: the survey is essentially given the same constitutional force as the decennial census, and considered explicitly to be part of it. Our Tories wanted to switch to a strictly voluntary version of the ACS, which would — or so we were warned, probably accurately — have led to lower response rates and compromised accuracy.

Canadian scholars rebelled against the Conservative move on the grounds that governments cannot have too much data and that it must be collected coercively to be complete and trustworthy. The Tories, in attempting to scrap our long form, were quietly pandering to the fears of conservative-friendly ethnic and religious minorities concerned about the history of census data in other countries being abused for totalitarian purposes.

Any scholar of the Second World War will tell you that this history is no fiction. But its unexpected appearance in Canadian life in the 21st century was thought to be paranoid and preposterous. What, you don’t trust Statistics Canada to protect your personal information?

Fast-forward to America in 2018, and the argument we find liberal blue states making is: of course people don’t trust the U.S. Census Bureau to protect their personal information! And they’re probably right not to! Because of President Trump! This is an argument we did not hear in Canada under prime minister Harper, but, as the New York lawsuit puts it: the “well-documented risks of adding a person-byperson citizenship demand to the decennial census are heightened in the current political climate because of President Trump’s antiimmigrant rhetoric and this Administration’s pattern of policies and actions that target immigrant communities.”

The premise of the states’ litigation is that asking census respondents a question about whether they are U.S. citizens will encourage panicky census evasion amongst illegal aliens, leading to an inevitable undercounting of resident populations in the states that have many such denizens. The bureau, goes the argument, is obligated to omit sensitive questions that could compromise the overall goal of an accurate national nose count. And if illegal immigrants are undercounted, that would have a disproportionate impact on the highly urbanized blue states.

You’ll notice that there are two premises here. The first has not really been tested, but from 1950 onward the bureau was worried enough to avoid putting citizenship on the short form as a matter of explicit policy, and experience with the ACS suggests that illegal immigrants do feel uncomfortable — sometimes to the point of fleeing from enumerators — when asked about citizenship.

If the first premise is true — that asking about citizenship must lead to undercounting in, and of, immigrant-heavy cities and states — then the second one does certainly follow. Canada’s census is more of a general policymaking instrument, but in the U.S., the federal government is constitutionally bound to distribute some tax funds according to the census population counts. And this, in turn, might activate the “equal protection” guarantee in the Fourteenth Amendment.

So the logic of the argument has strength. But one wonders whether U.S. courts will accept the explicitly political suggestion that what another president’s executive branch might do, in a different “climate,” is forbidden to this one.