Alarm over census citizenship question

Justice Department proposal raises concerns over lower count

WASHINGTON — A request by the Justice Department to ask people about their citizenship status in the 2020 census is stirring a broad backlash from census experts and others who say the move could wreck chances for an accurate count of the population — and, by extension, a fair redistricting of the House and state legislatures next decade.

Their fear, echoed by experts in the Census Bureau itself, is that the Trump administration’s hard-line stance on immigration, and especially on unauthorized immigrants, will lead Latinos and other minorities, fearing prosecution, to ignore a census that tracks citizenship status.

Their failure to participate would affect population counts needed not only to apportion legislative seats, but to distribute hundreds of billions of dollars in federal money to areas that most need it.

“I can think of no action the administration could take that would be more damaging to the accuracy of the 2020 census than to add a question on citizenship,” Terri Ann Lowenthal, a consultant and leading private expert on census issues, said in an interview. “It would completely pull the rug out from under efforts to have everyone participate in the census as

the Constitution envisions.”

The government has sought to count everyone living in the United States, legally and otherwise, since the first census in 1790. The decennial census has not asked all respondents whether they were citizens since 1960, although much smaller Census Bureau surveys of the population have continued to include citizenship questions.

The Justice Department request, first reported by ProPublica, was made in a Dec. 12 letter that said more detailed information on citizenship was critical to enforcing Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which bans racial discrimination in voting. The number of voting age citizens is one measure used to determine whether the minority population in a legislative district is sufficient to determine an election, and the department said the results of the smaller annual survey were too imprecise to be reliable.

Voting rights advocates said, however, that the data from that smaller survey had long been used effectively to enforce the law. They said that adding a citizenship question to the census would not enhance voting rights, but suppress them by reducing the head count of already undercounted minority groups, particularly the fast-growing Hispanic population.

“The first effect, of course, is on reapportionment,” said Tom Saenz, the president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, said. “And that seems to be the overarching goal — to stop the shifting of representation from non-Latino states to heavily Latino states.”

A substantial undercount would affect red and blue states alike — deeply Democratic California has nearly 7 million eligible Hispanic voters, while deeply Republican Texas has nearly 5 million. But the true impact would fall on Democratic representation at all levels of government, because Latinos and other minorities are largely reliably Democratic constituencies.

The last census failed to find 1.5 percent of the Hispanic population, the Census Bureau said, an undercount exceeded only by the 2.1 percent of African-Americans who were missed. No reliable estimate exists of how many more might be deterred from participating in the census by a citizenship question, but among several experts interviewed, the consensus was that it could be substantial.

Even small variations can have large political consequences. In 1997, Republicans vigorously fought a proposal to statistically adjust census results to address undercounts and overcounts, in no small part because their own study suggested the tweaks could affect election results in as many as 26 of the 435 House seats.

In a so-called long-form version of the census that was dropped after 2000, about 17 percent of respondents were asked whether they were citizens, although not whether they were in the country legally. Since then, the citizenship question has been asked annually in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which covers about 10 percent of the population each decade.

The citizenship question proposed by the Justice Department differs little, if at all, from the one in the American Community Survey. Experts fear that requiring an answer from all Americans would cause many minorities to avoid responding for fear that their responses would be given to other government agencies.

The dropouts would be likely to include not only unauthorized immigrants, but families who are in the country legally but who house friends or relatives who are not. Census Bureau experts raised that concern in a Sept. 17 memo to senior officials in which they noted a sharp rise “in respondents spontaneously expressing concerns about confidentiality in some of our pretesting studies” conducted since January, when President Donald Trump took office.

“Respondents reported being told by community leaders not to open the door without a warrant signed by a judge,” the memo stated. It also reported that “researchers observed respondents falsifying names, dates of birth, and other information on household rosters.”

In a statement, a Census Bureau spokesman, Michael Cook Sr., said Tuesday that a complete and accurate census was “one of our top priorities.”