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Trump's Census Citizenship Question Will Lead to Massive Under-count of Needy Children
Back in May 2017, Director John Thompson of the U.S. Census Bureau abruptly resgined after Congress refused to provide adequate funding for the upcoming 2020 census.
Every decade since 1790, as required by the Constitution, the federal government has undertaken a painstaking census of its people, the accuracy and fairness of which serves the interests of both political parties and of every citizen. The decennial count is used to apportion seats in the House of Representatives and set the boundaries of congressional districts. It determines how tens of billions of dollars in federal aid are divvied up.
In 2020, foreign-born groups might be less likely to respond to the census because, earlier this year, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross directed the Census Bureau, which is under his purview, to include a question about whether the respondent is an American citizen.
Fears of a federal immigration crackdown could lead many Americans to avoid participating in the 2020 federal census, which will include a controversial question about citizenship for the first time in 70 years. That, in turn, could cause as many as 1.5 million children to go uncounted, imperiling their access to federal programs, including food stamps and early childhood education.... the citizenship question could exacerbate a longstanding problem.
The citizenship question threatens the reliability of the decennial census and creates an opening for the administration to misallocate House members and electoral votes to their advantage. This could have serious long term implications:
1) An accurate decennial census is crucial in fairly distributing federal spending, and many federal program rely on accurrate census figures to accomplish their goals.
In 2010, the census missed about 1 million young children. Since the federal government didn’t know these children existed, it could not figure them into its decision-making process regarding the distribution of some $880 billion in federal funds. That included funding for some of the nation’s most popular safety-net programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Head Start early childhood education program, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, as well as funding for special education, school lunches and subsidized housing.
2) An accurate census is crucial to properly allocating representatives at both the federal and state level. Republican underfunding of the bureau damage census takers' ability to accurately account for those population most difficult to count - low-income Americans and minorities; the same demographic groups most likely to vote for Democrats.
Immigrants and naturalized citizens could also conclude that the Trump administration may use the question in an attempt to find, prosecute and ultimately expel undocumented immigrants.
Their refusal to respond to the census could depress population counts, which would skew the congressional redistricting efforts that follow the decennial federal census.
In such a scenario, Republicans would likely benefit, since people turned off by the citizenship question are somewhat more likely to live in Democratic districts that would see their populations reduced — and their congressional and statehouse representation diminished.
While the Census Bureau often appears to be one of the more unexciting agencies, their work is vitally important to the smooth operations of the federal government.