Potential citizenship question in 2020 Census could shift power to rural America

If cites --with immigrants, get underfunded that would be a win for Repugs also.



Potential citizenship question in 2020 Census could shift power to rural America


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/potential-citizenship-question-in-2020-census-could-shift-power-to-rural-america/2018/01/23/c4e6d2c6-f57c-11e7-beb6-c8d48830c54d_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_census-748am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.d92289690b99

A new U.S. citizen holds an American flag at a naturalization ceremony at the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site in Indianapolis in July 2014. (Michael Conroy/AP)



By Michael Scherer January 24 at 6:00 AM

A request by the Justice Department to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census ................................................

“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, nonetheless 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 in a statement to The Washington Post.

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. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, has not commented publicly on the idea.
‘Bad census data’

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 total 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.......................................