Noncitizens undercounted in census, confirming worries and jeoparding public benefits

The Fourteenth Amendment commands a full count of the American people every ten years. This Constitutional command has long been interpreted to include citizens and noncitizens, and it is used to apportion congressional seats and disperse $1.5 trillion a year in public benefits. In 2020, the headcount was esconsed in political drama encompassing a federal lawsuit, executive order, and Congressional hearings into President Trump and the GOP’s efforts to exclude noncitizens from that count. Academics, government officials, and activists worried that the proposed counts — and the tumult surrounding them — would scare off participation from noncitizens worried about immigration enforcement or otherwise mistrustful of the federal government. They were right.

The Census Bureau released a report saying that the 2020 census missed a substantial share of noncitizen residents. Despite their best efforts to halt the executive order and stymie its negative spillover effects, a tally of U.S. administrative records showed a 2.3% gap compared to the census count. That means more than 5 million people were potentially missing. The report concludes, there is a “possibility that the 2020 Census did not succeed in collecting data for a significant fraction of noncitizens residing in the United States.”

NPRs census reporter, Hansi Lo Wang, interviewed researchers who attribute most of the gap to noncitizen residents, particularly those of “unknown legal status.” This is because 19.7% of noncitizens counted in the simulated count of administrative records could not be matched with actual persons counted in the official census count.

Earlier simulations run by the census predicted a similar result, as did the findings in focus groups for the census’ outreach efforts following the Trump administration’s stalled effort to include a question about citizenship status on the census form and to subtract undocumented immigrants from the enumerated totals presented to the US Congress on the eve of President Biden’s inauguration in January 2020.

Other findings from the report indicate that men, Black and White Latino, and Latinos were overcounted and that Asian Americans were undercounted. For more on the significance of the census count for Asian and Latino communities in particular, see my prior writing here.

MHC