Why People Are Freaking Out About The Trump Administration's New Census Question On Citizenship

On Monday night, the Trump Administration's Department of Commerce (DOC) announced that the 2020 census will include a question about residents' citizenship status for the first time since 1950. 

Republicans say that citizenship information will help the government more accurately enforce and create policies related to voting, but Democrats say the question will scare non-citizens away from taking the census — skewing crucial population data. Now, the conflict looks like it will end up in court. Here's what's going on.

The DOJ Says It Wants The Data To Enforce The Voting Rights Act

The proposition to ask residents about the citizenship status began with a request from Jeff Sessions' Department of Justice (DOJ), which claimed to want census-level data on citizenship so that it could enforce Section 2 of The Voting Rights Act (VRA), which prohibits discrimination at the polls. 2.6% of the population is asked yearly about their citizenship in the DOC's American Community Survey, but the DOJ says the data is "insufficient in scope, detail, and certainty to meet its purpose under the VRA."

Vanita Gupta, who ran President Obama's Civil Rights Division, told The Atlantic "I think the argument ridiculous. The Justice Department has never needed or asked for that question on the short form of the census before and the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act does not need it."

The Question May Reduce Participation In The Census

Democrats have expressed concern that the question will reduce participation in the census.

Tom Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, told The Washington Post "I think the main motivation is to secure an undercount." 

Data from a 2017 test by census researchers shows that regardless of the fact that its illegal for the DOC to share personal information from the census, the citizenship question may still result in incomplete answers. In the Washington area, for instance, four out of 15 people provided incomplete answers because of privacy concerns, including those linked to immigration.

One Spanish-speaking respondent told researchers "Particularly with our current political climate, the Latino community will not sign up because they will think that Census will pass their information on and people can come looking for them."

That data combined with recent large-scale immigration raids suggest that the population will go undercounted because of the fears of immigrants.

Undercounting Could Have Serious Implications

An undercount would cause significant distortion in a number of population-based programs and decisions.

Most notably, census data is the basis for the redistricting the House of Representatives. Most undocumented immigrants live in just 20 metro areas across the US, according to Pew. Undercounting in these areas would most likely result in less representation from cities and more from suburban and rural areas. One study has estimated that 16 states could gain or lose a house seat on the basis of census data.

While representation in The House is based on total population, some Republican lawmakers have suggested undocumented immigrants ought to be left out. Republican Representative Steve King from Iowa has said that the citizenship question in the census could be a first step towards excluding non-citizens from the districting process: "We need to be counting citizens instead of people for the purposes of redistricting. That's going to take at a minimum a statute and it may take a constitutional amendment and so in this upcoming census, I want to count separately the citizens separate from the non-citizens[.]"

Besides the political fate of the US, census data also affects decisions on infrastructure location and the allocation of federal funds.

There's A Lot Of Backlash

Presumably because of the threat that the citizenship question poses Democratic representation, Democrats are now challenging the decision.

Since the DOC's announcement, California, New York and New Jersey have announced that they will sue the Trump Administration to prevent the question from being asked.

Representative Grace Meng of New York, who represents immigrant-dense Flushing, Queens, announced that she would introduce legislation to Congress that would prevent the question, saying "Many immigrants who are fearful of deportation under the current Administration will simply choose to not participate in the census out of fear that the information they provide will be used against them[.]"