Should census ask about citizenship?

Are you a United States citizen? That’s a question the census has not asked the entire U.S. population since 1950.

Should the 2020 census ask everyone?

Attorneys general from 19 states — Florida’s Pam Bondi is not among them — say that adding the question could lower participation among immigrants and cause a population undercount.

On the flip side, “Advocates of the so-called citizenship question say it is merely clerical, an effort to ascertain how many noncitizens reside in the United States,” The New York Times reported this week.

The debate is heating up as a deadline approaches: The Census Bureau says it must submit a final list of the 2020 census questions to Congress by March 31.

What’s at stake? Everything from how congressional seats are distributed around the country to where hundreds of billions of federal dollars are spent is determined by the accuracy of responses to the once-a-decade U.S. census.

Everyone wants an “accurate” head count in 2020, but what that means depends on who you ask. To sort out the issue, we enlisted two distinctly different viewpoints:

Kira Romero-Craft, managing attorney at LatinoJustice PRLDEF.

Hans A. von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation.