Citizenship question will put blinders on the Census and leave many uncounted

Math would seem to be immune from partisanship. Two plus two equals four. There’s only one result. There’s nothing about the process or the outcome to spin or dispute.

But now, as the math of the nation’s population is going against the Republican base, the science of numbers is taking a right turn toward a deliberately inaccurate result. That turn is the Trump administration’s last-minute decision to add a question to the 2020 Census asking if the respondent is a citizen.

The addition sounds innocent enough. Indeed, the administration says the information on citizenship will help it enforce the Voting Rights Act. But the aim isn’t to get an accurate count of who can vote. (That’s a laughable contention given Republicans’ efforts at voter suppression.) The aim is to generate a less accurate count of how many people are living in America. Two people here plus two immigrants there is about to equal something less than four.

Reducing the number of immigrants counted will help offset the shrinkage of white Americans as a share of the American population. That in turn helps a Republican Party that overwhelmingly relies on a base of white Americans.

A citizenship question will drive down the responses not only from undocumented immigrants afraid of deportation, but also the responses from native-born Americans and naturalized citizens who are living in immigrant communities. They’ll be wary of disclosing the presence of a non-citizen in their household at a time when federal officers are more aggressively arresting people who are in the U.S. illegally.

The risk from undercounting immigrants is high in North Carolina, said Rebecca Tippett, a demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She noted that 414,000 children in the state have at least one parent who is an immigrant. Undercounting many of those children could lead to the underfunding of schools. Meanwhile, missing anyone — child or adult — results in a loss of $988 per person in federal funding, she said.

Conservative Republicans welcome this filtering. An undercount of undocumented immigrants, their citizen children and other citizen relatives will help Republicans when legislative redistricting occurs after the 2020 Census.

Those who doubt this motivation can look at Texas. Conservatives there sought a change that would base redistricting on the number of people eligible to vote in a district rather than the total population of the district. In 2016, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Evenwel v. Abbott that the change would be unconstitutional. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, “As the Framers of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment comprehended, representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible or registered to vote.”

Frustrated at the Supreme Court level, conservatives now are trying to reshape the basis of legislative districts through the Census. But this is a dangerous manipulation for red states as well as blue. When a nation deliberately knows less about the people within its borders, more than districts are affected. Census numbers warped by politics will throw off calculations for distributing $675 billion in federal funding and create blind spots for all who rely on an accurate count.

Demographers, statisticians and social scientists take pains to avoid partisanship, but they object to the late addition of the citizenship question, saying it could have a chilling effect on the national count.

The Census Scientific Advisory Committee issued a statement Friday saying the new question will threaten the accuracy of the Census.

D. Sunshine Hillygus, a Duke political science professor who serves on the committee, said the political implications of adding the citizenship question are difficult to predict. But, she said, “What is really clear are the potential negative implications for the accuracy of the count, and the cost of the count, and the fact that the count has been politicized and what that may do to the level of cooperation of the public with the Census Bureau.”

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose department includes the Census Bureau, waved off these concerns. He said opponents of the change “did not provide definitive, empirical support” that it would reduce responses to the Census.

Of course, Ross also did not provide “definitive, empirical support” that asking about citizenship would not affect the survey’s accuracy. As a result, the Census is going out into the dark where more people – citizens and non-citizens alike – will not be seen.

Barnett: 919-829-4512

This story was originally published March 31, 2018 at 3:24 PM with the headline "Citizenship question will put blinders on the Census and leave many uncounted."