Census with citizenship question? Careful, it’s only a test.

Mock form could lead to confusion in wake of court’s ruling, experts say

Nearly a quarter-million households are getting formal questionnaires from the U.S. Census Bureau that include a controversial citizenship question, despite a Supreme Court ruling last month temporarily barring its inclusion in the 2020 count.

The mailers are part of a test to see what impact the question could have on response rates. Some already have been delivered to households in the Bay Area, where cities and counties were among the first to join the fight to stop the Trump Administration from asking a citizenship question.

Another roughly quartermillion households will receive surveys that don’t include the question. The trial run is intended to help the agency “fine-tune” how it contacts households that don’t respond to the census and determine who to target with an outreach campaign ahead of the 2020 count.

But why are federal officials still testing the impact of a question that won’t be asked, which some experts fear will spark confusion and fear, particularly among immigrants.

“I think that’s a great question,” said Julia Marks, a staff attorney with Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus’ voting rights and census program in San Francisco. “It’s a last-minute test. Usually tests happen way earlier in the process.”

Marks said the Asian Law Caucus and other advocacy groups urged the Census Bureau to plan ahead and cancel the test if the Supreme Court ruled against the citizenship question. The bureau, which announced the test before the court’s ruling, decided to send it anyway.

U.S. Census Bureau officials did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment.

Marks worries the test will cause “confusion, fear and keeps this issue in the news in a way that could deter people from participating down the line.”

It’s possible the test is being carried out in anticipation of an effort to add the question in the 2030 census, she said. In the Supreme Court’s June 27 ruling, Chief

Justice John Roberts called the justification for the inclusion in the 2020 count “contrived,” but left the door open for later efforts with different reasoning.

Shortly after that ruling, the Commerce Department announced it was printing the census forms without the question, which President Donald Trump contradicted in a tweet, saying, “We are absolutely moving forward.”

The president reversed course less than a week later, saying he would instead direct all government agencies to provide documents that could help

better count the number of immigrants in the country.

Experts and government officials anticipated the inclusion of a citizenship question would have led to a massive undercount in California among immigrant communities worried about how their responses would be used. Already, experts have said the high-profile debate over the question has made those residents less likely to participate, regardless of their immigration status.

California’s population could be undercounted by 596,200 people, according to an analysis from The Urban Institute, a nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C. That includes 462,300 Hispanic and 96,700 black residents.

Every person not counted costs California roughly $2,000 in early education funding, food assistance and housing vouchers, according to George Washington University. That means the Urban Institutes anticipated undercount could cost California $1.16 billion in federal funding.

In the meantime, households that get a copy of the census test are legally required to participate, according to a summary of frequently asked questions included with the test forms and online. And those households still will be expected to participate in the official count.

“You might have gotten a survey in the past,” Marks said. “But March 2020, fill it out.”