Census 2020: Controversy to Result in a Record Undercount?
Based on the census count every ten years, the seats in the House of Representatives are distributed according to the number of people living in the country. Earlier this week, the Trump administration triggered a firestorm of controversy in announcing that it intends to exclude undocumented immigrants from any reapportionment of representatives. This has been claimed to be unconstitutional, and it definitely will not help with response numbers for a census that is already at risk of undercounting the population.
An accurate count of our country’s population is essential. Unfortunately, an accurate count is at serious risk.
Hansi Lo Wang for NPR reminds us that the counting of undocumented immigrants for census purposes has long been an issue of political and legal contention:
“There is a decades-long history of lawsuits going bac1k to the 1980s that tried to get unauthorized immigrants excluded from the apportionment count. The cases, which were led by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an immigration restrictionist group, were ultimately dismissed.
But Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state who is now running in a Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat, has raised with the Trump administration the “problem that aliens who do not actually ‘reside’ in the United States are still counted for congressional reapportionment purposes.”
With the national census self-response rate at just over 62%, the White House announcement threatens to derail the Census Bureau’s efforts to finish tallying up roughly four out of 10 households that have not filled out a census form on their own.”
The Federation for American Immigration Reform has expressed support for President Trump’s recent Census actions.
UPDATE (July 24): The Migration Policy Institute estimates that the Trump administration’s decision to exclude undocumented immigrants from the Census 2020 counts for congressional districting “could exclude up to 20 million U.S. citizens from the once-a-decade exercise to decide political representation, as a new Migration Policy Institute commentary reveals. Indeed, a 2018 U.S. Census Bureau effort to match 2010 Census responses to administrative data produced a 9 percent failure rate, totaling 28 million people.
Not surprisingly, Nick Cahill for Courthouse News Service reports that:
“The city of Atlanta, along with a coalition of nonprofits and naturalized citizens, sued late Thursday to stop President Donald Trump’s plan to exclude undocumented people from the upcoming census.
In a federal lawsuit filed in Washington D.C., the plaintiffs cast Trump’s unprecedented attempt to change the once-a-decade count used to divvy seats in Congress as racially and politically motivated.”
KJ