By: Samantha Dorn, Staff Writer
A federal judge in New York will soon make a decision on the issue of whether the Trump administration violated federal law when it added a citizenship question to the 2020 census.[1] According to the Commerce Secretary, Wilbur L. Ross, Jr., the proposed question would give a respondent five options to answer the query, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”: (1) born in the U.S., (2) born in a U.S. territory, (3) born abroad of U.S. citizen parents, (4) U.S. citizen by naturalization (with space to print the year of naturalization), and (5) not a U.S. citizen.[2]
Various states, cities, and immigrant-advocacy groups have filed lawsuits claiming that the question could scare immigrants into not participating in the census.[3] They claim that this will cause the population in communities to be undercounted, which would cost them political representation and access to federal aid.[4] According to the Census Bureau, the citizenship question could, conservatively, reduce the number of responses by six million households—about 5.8 percent.[5] Social scientists have also stated that the results from an undercount would hurt health and social science research because of flawed population data that could compromise the accuracy and representation of other government surveys.[6]
Lawyers from the Department of Justice say that Ross had “sweeping authority” to alter the census so long as he followed “minimal guidelines.”[7] In addition, the Justice Department argues that the administration needs the information gathered from the proposed questions in order to enforce the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters and provides that citizens may not be denied the right to vote based on race or color.[8]
The official Census is distributed to households every ten years as mandated by Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution.[9] Not only does it count the number of people in the country, it also determines how seats in the House of Representatives are divided among the states.[10] The information collected in the census is kept confidential; it is only to be used for statistical purposes, and it cannot be divulged to any person or entity—not even another federal agency or department.[11] It is interesting to note that the Census Bureau must notify Congress of the general census subjects to be addressed three years before the census, and the specific questions to be asked two years before.[12]
The last time the census had a question about citizenship status was in 1950.[13] It was removed when the Census Bureau reduced the number of questions asked of all households and increased the number asked to a sample of the population.[14] According to the plaintiffs in the federal case, the Census Bureau has opposed re-adding a citizenship question because it could result in lower response rates and a population undercount.[15]
While a citizenship question is not asked on the official decennial census, the yearly American Community Survey (ACS) does have questions about a respondent’s place of birth, citizenship, and year of entry into the United States.[16] The ACS focuses on the shifting social and economic characteristics of the country, but it does not give an official population count like the census does.[17] The purposes for including these questions on the ACS are to ensure that communities and governments are enforcing laws against discrimination based on national origin, to understand the needs of foreign-born students and fund school programs for those students, and determine if people of different races or national origins have equal opportunities in education, employment, home ownership, and other areas.[18] The ACS is distributed to only 3.5 million households each year, but recipients are legally obligated to respond to it.[19]
This legal debate may not begin to be settled until February 2019 when the case is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.[20] If and when the case reaches the Supreme Court, justices would be pressured to rule by early summer so that the wording of the 2020 Census forms can be verified for printing.[21] If the question is ultimately included in the census, it is uncertain how communities will respond to it (and the census as a whole) until the forms are filled out and mailed back to the Census Bureau in 2020. The debate may not even be resolved until 2092, when individual records for the 2020 census are made accessible to the public.[22]
Sources:
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawsuit-over-census-citizenship-question-now-in-judges-hands-1543357904?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=2; https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=4450092-State-of-New-York-et-al-v-U-S-Department-of
[2]http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/30/what-to-know-about-the-citizenship-question-the-census-bureau-is-planning-to-ask-in-2020/
[3]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-census/supreme-court-to-hear-census-citizenship-question-dispute-idUSKCN1NL2CH
[4]Id.
[5]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/us/citizenship-question-census.html
[6]http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/30/what-to-know-about-the-citizenship-question-the-census-bureau-is-planning-to-ask-in-2020/;https://psmag.com/news/why-a-census-undercount-spells-trouble-for-social-scientists
[7]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/us/citizenship-question-census.html
[8]https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawsuit-over-census-citizenship-question-now-in-judges-hands-1543357904?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=2; Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. No. 89-110, § 2, 79 Stat. 437, 437.
[9]U.S. Const. art. I, § 2, cl. 3.
[10]Id.
[11]13 U.S.C.S. §9.
[12]https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/2020-census/about/what-is.html
[13]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-census/supreme-court-to-hear-census-citizenship-question-dispute-idUSKCN1NL2CH
[14]http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/30/what-to-know-about-the-citizenship-question-the-census-bureau-is-planning-to-ask-in-2020/
[15]Id.
[16]https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-question/citizenship/
[17]https://www.prb.org/differences/
[18]https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-question/citizenship/
[19]https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/about/top-questions-about-the-survey.html
[20]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/us/citizenship-question-census.html
[21]Id.
[22]An Act to amend chapter 21 of title 44, United States Code to include new provisions relating to the acceptance and use of records transferred to the custody of the Administrator of General Services, Pub. L. No. 95-416, §(b)(2), 92 Stat. 915, 915 (1978).
