Wall Street Journal
By Paul Overburg and Janet Adamy
March 26, 2018
The decision, announced in a letter by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, immediately generated strong pushback from Democrats and immigrant groups, who say it will reduce responses from immigrants.
The Commerce Department said the question would help enforce the Voting Rights Act by providing block-level citizenship data on potential voters. It noted that the Justice Department and courts use this data to protect minority voting rights.
Opponents of asking about citizenship have said it would distort vital population totals that are used to determine congressional seats and large amounts of federal funding for programs such as Medicaid.
The citizenship question will disrupt census planning and may affect its overall cost and accuracy as well. Though the census is two years away, planning is nearly complete. The question wasn’t included in the last chance for testing, a full rehearsal under way involving the 275,000 households in Providence County, R.I.
A citizenship question appears on the bureau’s American Community Survey, which reaches 2.2 million households each year. Results are used to enforce voting-rights laws, but the Justice Department contended that data isn’t detailed enough. The department seeks to have the question answered by every American household as part of the 2020 Census. The Commerce Department noted that such a question was asked on the decennial census from 1820 to 1950.
The question will mirror the ACS question, which asks whether a person is a citizen by birth or by naturalization or isn’t a citizen. It won’t ask about the legality of an immigrant’s presence.
About half of the 44 million immigrants are U.S. citizens, according to ACS data. Of those who aren’t, about half are unauthorized immigrants, according to separate estimates made by the Pew Research Center and the Department of Homeland Security.
Civil-rights and immigration-advocacy groups argue that the question would prompt even legal immigrants to shun the census. That would force the bureau to hire more workers to follow up in person, driving up the cost and lowering accuracy.
For each 1% of U.S. households that don’t respond, the bureau will have to send workers to about 1.2 million homes, often several times, to collect the information.
Even so, millions of households could get missed. After the 2010 Census, the bureau estimated that it had counted the overall population accurately, but that it had double-counted millions, especially middle-aged whites, and missed millions of minorities. It overcounted whites by 0.8% and undercounted Hispanics by 1.5% and blacks by 2.1%. That translated into a 1% undercount in Texas and an overcount of 0.8% in New York.
Mr. Ross said the agency’s review “found that limited empirical evidence exists about whether adding a citizenship question would decrease response rates materially.”
But he directed that the question should be placed at the end of the questionnaire “to minimize any impact on decennial census response rates.”
Civil-rights groups and lawmakers immediately criticized the administration’s decision. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said on Twitter late Monday that he was filing suit against the Trump administration over the question, contending that it is illegal.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y) wrote on Twitter: “By adding a citizenship question to the #2020Census, @SecretaryRoss has succumbed to the hateful, nativist views that are the hallmark of this administration & deliberately compromised the integrity of the #Census for political purposes.”
“We will work with our coalition, the business community, bipartisan state and local officials, and other civic leaders to overturn this ill-advised decision,” said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
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