Blog 4.3 - Census

1. What question will be added to the Census in 2020?
The 2020 census will ask every American household to record which members of their family are US citizens.

2. How does the government justify this addition?
The government’s justification for the question sounds simple enough: Asking about citizenship will provide more information about who is in the United States, and more information is always good.

3. Why do people have a problem with this addition?
The critics are skeptical that the Trump administration intends to use citizenship data for good reasons. The not-so-subtle implication, critics say, is that that it’s part of a broader project by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and company to take America back to the pre-civil rights era.

4. Why is it important to states that the undocumented immigrants that live there answer the Census?
The census is used to determine congressional apportionment for the next decade, allocate federal funding for infrastructure, and serve as the basis for huge amounts of American research.

5. What limit is put on the Census bureau to prevent the problems people are concerned about?
Federal law strictly prohibits the Census Bureau from sharing information. But under Trump, it’s really hard for any government official to persuade immigrants — or US-born Latinos — that she can be trusted to protect them.

6. How are both critics of Trump and the Trump administration technically correct about this 
particular question on the Census?
The Trump administration is correct in the technical sense: 2010 was the only year that no survey conducted as part of the US census asked about citizenship. But the critics are also correct: Citizenship hasn’t been a question on the mandatory census survey since 1950.

7. What does the Dept of Justice say is the reason it needs this citizenship information?
The DOJ’s reasoning was that to appropriately enforce the Voting Rights Act, the DOJ needs to know where eligible voters, and specifically eligible voters of color, live — and so they have to be able to distinguish citizens from noncitizens.

8. How is Congress's power of the purse affecting the Census?
Previous field tests had to be canceled because in 2016 and 2017, the Republican-controlled Congress wasn’t funding the Census Bureau at the levels it needed to conduct a full test.

9. If the Census won't actually share information, why do Democrats care if this question is included?
The much more real and imminent concern, among Democrats and advocates, is that many Latinos will worry so much that the Census Bureau will send their information to ICE — or will freak out at the sight of any government mail, much less a government official on their doorstep — that the Latino response rate to the census will decrease substantially.

10. How does this article explain the actual ground work of the Census happens? (How do they actually count people?)
Only 67 percent of Americans responded to the initial census survey by mail in 2000, and 72 percent in 2010. To get the rest, the Census Bureau dispatched half a million temporary census takers to visit houses up to six times in the hopes of speaking with someone in person — often hiring census takers from within the community, to reduce the anxiety of speaking to a government official.

11. What groups have been undercounted in past attempts at the Census?
African Americans, particularly African-American men, have been undercounted in the past two censuses. So have Latinos, who were undercounted by 0.8 percent in 2000 and 1.5 percent in 2010. The Census Bureau says the change between the two censuses wasn’t statistically significant. But if the Latino response rate plummets in 2020, the undercount rate will soar.

12. Why is it strange that a question is being added this close to the administration of the actual 
Census?
Usually, census questions go through a pretesting process that can take years. But the 2020 census is already well past the development stage. As the Commerce Department announced the addition of a citizenship question, the Census Bureau was conducting its only full “dress rehearsal” field test for the 2020 census, in Providence, Rhode Island.

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