Trump’s citizenship question for census in limbo, but CA isn’t letting guard down. Here’s why
The Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question on the 2020 census was thrown into limbo Thursday by the nation’s highest court. But California officials remain wary of a last-minute revival, saying the Golden State stands to lose both politically and financially if the question resurfaces.
In its ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court said Trump’s Commerce Department has the authority to ask people on the census form if they are citizens, but it had so far failed to offer an adequate reason for doing so. The administration now has a few weeks to offer a more focused rationale in hopes of winning an 11th-hour judicial approval.
The question it wants to ask is itself simple. “Are you a citizen of the United States?” But state officials say the ramifications are huge.
If immigrants and other minorities avoid filling out the census for fear of being targeted by police or immigration officials, California could lose hundreds of millions of federal dollars over the next decade for key social services, including money to schools for low-income programs, as well as funds for road improvements.
The state also could lose a Congressional seat, which means the loss of a presidential Electoral College vote.
“That is not a rounding error that we won’t notice,” said Assemblyman Marc Berman, who heads one of the legislature’s two census committees. “And how do you quantify a (lost) Congressional district?”
A Sacramento Bee analysis finds that the state has the largest estimated number of non-citizens in the country by far, 5.3 million. That represents about 13.5 percent of the state’s population, nearly twice the non-citizen percentage of the nation as a whole, according to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, an annual sampling of American households.
A majority of those residents, or about 2.9 million, are believed to be unauthorized immigrants, according to the latest estimates from the Department of Homeland Security. Others are here legally as permanent residents with Green Cards, or with temporary work visas, or under other protected legal status.
California is particularly vulnerable to an undercount in the San Joaquin Valley, notably in Merced, Tulare and Madera, but also in coastal counties with heavy agriculture, Monterey and Santa Clara. Monterey County, which includes the agricultural Salinas Valley, is highest as 21.5 percent of its residents aren’t citizens.
The largest total number of non-citizens, however, live in urban Los Angeles, a county that counts more non-citizens than all but three states other than California. Portions of the San Francisco Bay Area also count high non-citizen populations.
Damage already done?
Even without the citizenship question, advocates say the Trump administration’s antagonistic view towards immigrants threatens to cause an undercount in California.
“The damage has been done, regardless of the decision today,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Thursday. “This has been delayed, but the Trump Administration has not been denied the fear and anxiety that he has caused and induced and that is still very present in society today.”
To counteract that, California officials and advocacy groups are preparing to launch a historic $100-million-plus campaign this summer to persuade typically under-represented groups to fill out the census, telling them that the state and civil rights organizations will protect them against improper federal use of the data.
“This fight likely isn’t over,” said Secretary of State Alex Padilla, head of the state’s efforts to get an accurate population count. He had earlier decried Trump’s effort to add the question as “a continuation of the president’s blatant agenda to fan the flames of anti-immigrant hostility.”
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has sued the Trump administration over the citizenship question. “Everyone counts,” he said on Thursday. “We will fight to ensure that our friends, neighbors, and loved ones can stand up and be counted without fear. The services we all rely on — good schools, decent roads and public transportation, reliable public safety, and quality hospitals and clinics — are all on the line.”
California doesn’t stand alone. An undercount of non-citizens would hit Texas, a Trump-supportive state, as well. That state is expected to gain Congressional seats and Electoral College votes because of population gains over the past decade. But it could qualify for one less than anticipated if response rates are suppressed.
Nevada, New York, New Jersey and Florida also could lose federal funds. (Of the 20 states with the highest proportion of non-citizens, 15 backed Hilary Clinton for president in 2016.)
Upholding the law?
Under the Trump plan, a person living alone would be asked eight questions on the census form, including name, address, age and race. The final question will be: “Are you a citizen of the United States?” Householders, such as parents, would be asked to answer a similar question for everyone living in their residence: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”
For its part, the Trump administration has contended that it is trying to uphold voting law.
In announcing his decision last year to add the question, Commerce Department Secretary Wilbur Ross wrote that the federal government needs to know at the block level how many residents are citizens and how many are non-citizens in order to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act.
“I have determined that reinstatement of a citizenship question on the 2020 decennial census is necessary to provide complete and accurate data” to protect minority population voting rights, Ross wrote. He added, “the question is no additional imposition since census responses by law may only be used anonymously and for statistical purposes.”
Ross noted that neither the Census Bureau nor stakeholders have documented that “the response rate would in fact decline materially.”
“While there is widespread belief among many parties that adding a citizenship question could reduce response rates, the Census Bureau’s analysis did not provide definitive, empirical support for that belief,” he wrote.
The Supreme Court majority on Thursday indicated it did not buy that argument. In an opinion piece, the court majority called it “contrived.”
Immigrant advocates cry foul
Advocates for immigrants and minority groups contend the Trump administration is attempting to intimidate those populations and keep them from filling out the census, thus improving the chances of creating more political districts that benefit Republicans.
They point to recently uncovered documents indicating that a now-deceased Republican operative, Tom Hofeller, promoted the citizenship question to the Trump administration as way to tilt redistricting in Republican favor. The administration disputes that contention. A federal district court in Maryland, in a separate case, this week indicated it will review the Hofeller documents.
Lizette Escobedo, census campaign director for National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, said she fears the question would cause many to duck the census out of fear that it will attract immigration officials. “It is an attack on Latinos, on our immigrant community and on the democratic process,” she said.
Basim Elkarra of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said Muslim Americans would feel caught in a bind if the question were on the form. If they fail to fill out the census, they are not counted, but if they fill it out and skip that question, the result could be scarier: “Someone is going to come knocking on your door, and that is going to make the process worse.”
How much of an undercount?
The census mission, mandated by the U.S. Constitution, is to count every person living in the United States once each 10 years. Census day is April 1, 2020. Questionnaires will be distributed to the public in March.
The census count determines how federal funds from 55 federal spending programs get distributed to states, communities and households annually for the next decade. In 2016, those funds totaled around $883 billion. That comes out to about $2,700 per U.S. resident that year. Most of that money goes to low-income residents via programs like Medicaid and food stamps.
When one state population shrinks in proportion to the others, it stands to lose federal funding, while other states gain.
Census and demographics analysts say they believe a citizenship question would suppress response among immigrants, but there is no consensus on how much.
The Harvard study estimated the census could miss more than six million Hispanics nationally, in part because some household heads who fill out the firm will decline to list and identify everyone living in the residence, essentially hiding household members from the government.
In California, a Public Policy Institute of California report suggests a scenario under which more than 1.6 million Californians may not be counted - including residents in a variety of hard-to-count groups- out of a total population of about 40 million.
But the California state Legislative Analyst’s Office has taken a more benign view. An undercount of hard-to-count groups is “plausible,” it said, but it believes the state is unlikely to lose a Congressional seat, and that the state budget likely would lose an amount that could be in the tens of millions of dollars each year.
“In budgetary terms, this amount of money is very small,” the LAO wrote last year.
Citizenship question not new
Republicans point out this would not be the first time that the Census Bureau has asked the citizenship question. The question was last asked of all residents in the 1950 census. Since then, the bureau has asked the question of a subset of about one-sixth the nation’s residents on what was called the decennial census “long-form,” a questionnaire that provided a deeper dive into demographic trends nationally.
The long form was discontinued after the 2000 census. But the bureau has been asking the citizenship question during an annual sample survey of three-plus million households called the American Community Survey (ACS).
Two recent studies of the citizenship question on the ACS suggest the question does not necessarily lead to honest or accurate answers.
A 2014 study by Penn State and Temple University demographers noted a potential problem: Some non-citizen immigrants are marking themselves as citizens in the ACS. One of the study authors, Jennifer Van Hook, a former Census Advisory Board member, more recently said increasing mistrust of the government will lead to inaccurate results on the 2020 census if the citizenship question is included.
A 2018 study for the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality found decreasing numbers of ACS respondents have been answering the citizenship question annually between 2010 and 2016, notably among Asian Americans and Hispanics.
A McClatchy News review found that the number of foreign-born residents in particular who didn’t answer the citizenship question rose again in 2017, the first year of the Trump presidency.
California officials say they will spend in excess of $100 million, far more money than any other state, on community outreach efforts aimed at persuading hard-to-count people to fill out their forms. Officials point out that, under Title 13 of the U.S. Code, the Census Bureau is required to keep respondent information confidential, and that answers cannot be used against respondents in court or by government agencies such as immigration officials.
The Census Bureau, however, could publish data showing how many non-citizens live in each neighborhood, if it is allowed to ask that question.
Assemblyman Berman said the state will push for a full count. “We trust the law. The law is on our side.”
This story was originally published June 27, 2019 at 9:21 AM with the headline "Trump’s citizenship question for census in limbo, but CA isn’t letting guard down. Here’s why."