In Wednesday’s New York Times, Michael Wines targeted Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr.’s explanations for why the Trump administration added a question about citizenship to the 2020 census -- or more accurately, re-added and expanded.
In “A Question’s Murky Path Onto the 2020 Census,” Wines went on the warpath against a very basic proposed Census question about citizenship, one that last appeared on a Census form -- the “long-form” version -- in 2000 (the next to last Census taking). The long form went to about 1 of 6 households nationwide:
Government emails disclosed in a federal lawsuit show that within months of taking office, the Trump administration began discussing the need to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, contradicting initial accounts of how officials made the controversial decision.
....
The emails, which were disclosed late Monday, cast further doubt on the administration’s initial explanation that the citizenship question was added at the request of the Justice Department, which officials said needed the data to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
That account has steadily crumbled as more evidence has been unearthed in a lawsuit by 17 states and others challenging the citizenship question.
The question is the focus of a furious battle between the administration and an array of critics who fear asking it would render the 2020 tally so inaccurate as to be unreliable. Those critics, which include civil liberties groups, local governments and business interests, say that large numbers of both legal and undocumented immigrants will refuse to fill out census forms that demand that they disclose their citizenship status.
The phrase they’re not finding was “illegal immigrants.”
Besides fear over enforcement of immigration laws, The Times was also worried about Democratic political prospects:
A lower head count in areas with large numbers of immigrants could reduce Democratic representation when new state and congressional districts are drawn in 2021.
The red state of Texas also has plenty of illegals, but for some reason that’s not seen as a cause for concern.
Wines was hard-core in tone:
Opponents pounced on the new documents as fresh evidence of deception. The documents confirm that the decision “was made without regard to the federal government’s scientific standards or the consequences for the accuracy and quality of census data,” said Terri Ann Lowenthal, a consultant and leading expert on census issues who worked for the Obama transition team. “The disregard for the scientific process is truly alarming.”
But Wines left off the fact that a Census citizenship question is far from unprecedented. The Census Bureau asked all U.S. households a question about U.S. citizenship until 1950. A similar question appeared in the long-form version in 2000, and the question is still asked today in the American Community Survey, which goes to 3.5 million households annually. (The long-form was used from 1970 to 2000, and the 2010 Census only used a short-form questionnaire . It did not ask about citizenship.)
Wines' July 11 story included a “far right” label under the loaded headline “Census Query On Citizenship Is ‘Bad Faith,’ Judge Suggests.” Which does not mean unauthorized or somehow illegal:
From the moment it was announced in March, the decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census was described by critics as a ploy to discourage immigrants from filling out the form and improve Republican political fortunes. The Commerce Department, which made the decision, insisted that sound policy, not politics, was its sole motivation....The census tally, which includes everyone living in the United States regardless of immigration status, is used to reapportion political boundaries every 10 years to account for population changes. But a growing movement on the far right seeks to exclude undocumented immigrants from being counted during reapportionment; Alabama’s Republican secretary of state filed a lawsuit in May seeking to do exactly that.
Even liberal National Public Radio reported the less-than-chilling context: “Starting in 1970, questions about citizenship were included in the long-form questionnaire but not the short form....For instance, in 2000, those who received the long form were asked, 'Is this person a CITIZEN of the United States?'"
