Citizenship question may be added to census

GOP likely would gain; Democrats doubt accuracy

A request by the Justice Department to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census could give Republicans a new political advantage.

WASHINGTON — A request by the Justice Department to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census could shift the nation’s balance of political power from cities to more rural communities over the next decade and give Republicans a new advantage drawing electoral boundaries.

Population numbers produced by the census are used in many ways, notably to draw political districts and distribute government funds. Adding questions to the decennial survey is usually a controversial and difficult process because of the potential to affect both of those functions — either by suppressing census participation or by creating new ways to define populations.

Hispanic groups angry

All of it has prompted advocates for Hispanic communities to accuse the Justice Department of wanting to produce a less accurate count in 2020.

“I think the main motivation is to secure an undercount,” said Tom Saenz, the president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. “Texas is a very red state. They know that is not going to be the case for very much longer.”

The citizenship question is a particularly fraught one because noncitizens, who may not vote, are counted for the purposes of distributing federal funding, apportioning congressional seats and drawing district maps for state and local elections.

A majority of the nation’s undocumented immigrants live in just 20 metropolitan areas, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center study of Census Bureau data, numbering about 1 million in the New York and Los Angeles areas, 575,000 in Houston and 475,000 in Dallas.

That makes urban leaders, mostly Democrats, alarmed by the possibility of the citizenship question — primarily because census data help guide the distribution of more than $675 billion a year in federal funding.

“The Justice Department’s proposal to request citizenship status as part of the census is extremely damaging to the ability to secure an accurate count,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said.

The Census Bureau is expected to finalize the 2020 questionnaire by March 31. Officials have said they are evaluating the December request from the Justice Department and will make a decision in consultation with the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The census forms that are targeted to all households have not included questions about citizenship or country of birth since 1950. Instead, the government has acquired that data by surveying a sample of the population.

Four former census directors warned in a 2015 legal filing that any effort to add a question about citizenship for all households in the count would undermine its accuracy.

“The sum effect would be bad census data,” they wrote of the idea. “And any effort to correct for the data would be futile.”

In testing for the 2020 Census, immigrant communities have expressed a heightened reluctance to answer the coming questionnaire, even without any mention of a citizenship question.

Census researchers found that respondents in 2017 technology tests spontaneously brought up concerns about confidentiality and privacy at alarmingly high rates. In one test in the Washington area, four out of 15 people interviewed provided incomplete or inaccurate information because of those concerns, including several who mentioned fears that the data could be used by the government against immigrants.

Confusion, suspicion

The government is barred from using raw, individualized census data for law enforcement. But confusion and suspicion have long been a barrier to getting an accurate count.

The problem persisted. The Census Bureau found that in 2010, the government overcounted the non-Hispanic population by 0.8 percent, largely because people with multiple homes answered the survey multiple times. The census undercounted Hispanics by 1.5 percent.

In some cases, the partisan effects could hurt Republicans.

Alabama, for instance, where an estimated 65,000 undocumented residents lived in 2014, is threatened with losing one of its seven congressional seats by a margin of no more than 10,000 total people after the 2020 count, said Michael Li, who studies the census for the Brennan Center for Justice.

And because of the Voting Rights Act, the state’s lone majority-minority district is probably going to remain in place, meaning one of its majority-white Republican districts would have to go.

“Alabama is literally on the cusp,” he said.