Healey, others make final bid to drop census citizenship question
Further cements immigration as issue
WASHINGTON — State and local officials from Massachusetts and across the country urged the federal government to drop its plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S. Census, as Democrats and civil rights advocates rallied for public opposition to the plan.
The moves further crystallized immigration as the key issue both Republicans and Democrats are prioritizing ahead of November’s midterm elections.
In comments to the Census Bureau, which is mulling a regulation change to add the question to the census survey for the first time since 1950, Bay State Attorney General Maura Healey and other officials said the move would harm all residents in states like Massachusetts, resulting in underrepresentation in Congress and decreased federal funding.
The officials “represent areas with some of the largest minority and immigrant populations in the country.”
“Thus, we will be disproportionately affected by a census undercount, potentially reducing the number of congressional representatives and allocation of federal funding for infrastructure and public education, health, and housing for the next decade,” Healey and the other officials wrote in comments to the Commerce Department.
Yesterday was the last day comments could be submitted — spurring a flurry of messaging on social media and elsewhere by advocates pressing members of the public to chime in.
A Brookings Institution analysis estimated that inclusion of the question could deter 24.3 million people from participating in the census. That would include American citizens who fear that information they share could imperil family members who have green cards or are in the country illegally.
Civil rights advocates said those in minority communities and mixed-immigration households would be particularly hard hit.
Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Human Rights, said including the question for all census-takers is a method to disenfranchise people.
“Right now we are at a moment where the census is being politicized and weaponized for political gain,” Gupta said.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a memo earlier this year that the question was being added at the behest of the Department of Justice in an effort to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.
But documents released as part of an ongoing legal challenge Healey and other officials filed against the Commerce Department showed that anti-immigration hardliners lobbied for inclusion of the question, including Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who led President Trump’s short-lived commission on voter fraud.
In his memo, Ross noted that the question is already included in the supplemental American Community Survey, which is given to a limited sample of censustakers.