Group of states protest bid to add citizenship query to census

SAN FRANCISCO -- It's been nearly 70 years since census-takers last asked all residents in the nation whether they were U.S. citizens. Now the Trump administration's Justice Department wants to reinstate the citizenship question for the 2020 census and says doing so would improve voting-rights enforcement.

But California, other Democratic-majority states and immigrant advocates see a more sinister purpose: to reduce census participation by intimidating undocumented immigrants and their families, and thereby lowering population counts that are the basis for determining the number of a state's seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The last-minute request to add a citizenship question to the census, with no time to test its effects, ``would violate the Constitution and undermine the purposes of the Voting Rights Act that the Justice Department claims it wants to protect,'' attorneys general of California, 17 other states and Washington, D.C., along with the governor of Colorado, said in a letter last week to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose department includes the Census Bureau.

Nonsense, said Justice Department spokesman Devin O'Malley. He said the department ``is committed to free and fair elections for all Americans and has sought reinstatement of the citizenship question on the census to fulfill that commitment.''

The Census Bureau itself is leaderless -- President Trump has not appointed a director, and his reported choice as the deputy who would direct the next census, Thomas Brunell, a political science professor who has advocated for Republicans in redistricting disputes, withdrew his name last week.

But if Ross, a Trump appointee, agrees to add a citizenship query to the census by the March 31 deadline, the next stop will be federal court.

The states' lawyers, in their letter to Ross, said they would not accept census manipulations that would ``threaten our states' fair representation in Congress, dilute our states' role in the Electoral College, and deprive our states of their fair share of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funds.''

The Constitution prescribes the census, or ``enumeration,'' every 10 years, and says each state's representatives will be determined ``by counting the whole number of persons,'' without referring to citizenship.

Since the Supreme Court decreed the ``one-person, one-vote'' equality rule for electoral districts in 1963, all states have apportioned their districts according to overall population rather than citizenship. In a lawsuit that sought to require apportionment based on the number of eligible voters -- which would have excluded noncitizens, prisoners and children -- the high court ruled unanimously in 2016 that there was no constitutional basis to prohibit ``this long-standing use of total population.''

But the census has long sought additional information about the population it is counting. Census-takers first asked respondents in 1820 whether they were ``foreigners not naturalized.'' In 1850 they added a question about birthplace, and another in 1900 about the year a person entered the United States.

After the 1950 census, however, the citizenship question was removed from the basic census document and transferred to the ``long-form'' census, a more extensive questionnaire sent to 1 in 6 households. In 2000 it was moved again to the American Community Survey, a longer query sent annually to about 3 million households.

The current controversy arose from a Dec. 12 letter to the Census Bureau from the Justice Department, which said it needs a complete count of the ``citizen voting-age population'' to enforce part of the Voting Rights Act's protections for racial minorities.

That provision says district lines in areas with substantial minority populations should be drawn, when possible, to make them a majority of the eligible voters, in order to give minority voters a better chance to elect their preferred representative. Such districts make up about one-fourth of U.S. House seats. Without an actual citizenship count, the Justice Department said, it would be hampered in enforcing the law's ``important protections against racial discrimination in voting.''

The request came nearly a year after the normal deadline for preparing topics for the census, a timetable designed to allow testing of the cost and impact of any new questions. Civil rights advocates noted that the proposal came from the same administration that has backed state voter ID laws and other measures that have reduced minority turnout.

``This Department of Justice has no interest in good-faith enforcement of the Voting Rights Act,'' said attorney Jonathan Stein, who heads the Voting Rights Program for Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco. He said adding a citizenship question ``would scare off some of the communities that are already under-participating in the census.''

Such a change ``dramatically increases the risk of an unsuccessful census,'' said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of political science and public policy at the University of California at Riverside. He said reduced participation in ``immigrant-heavy areas'' would lower not only their representation in Congress and state legislatures, but also their share of numerous federal and state benefit programs, and even affect relocation decisions by private businesses.

The dispute was the topic of a pointed debate this month on Los Angeles radio station KPCC.

A census question would have a ``bull's-eye effect'' on California, whose population is nearly 40 percent Latino, said Phil Sparks, co-director of an advocacy group called the Census Project and associate director of the Census Bureau under President Bill Clinton from 1996 to 1999.

Sparks, who was a part-time census-taker as a graduate student, said that if he went door to door in urban neighborhoods now and asked census questions that included citizenship, ``a lot of people wouldn't answer ... whether citizens or noncitizens.''

But why should a state's congressional representation be swelled by the presence of ``illegal aliens?'' retorted James Copland, director of the Center for Legal Policy at the conservative Manhattan Institute. He noted that undocumented immigrants, and some legal immigrants as well, are ineligible for federal benefits such as food stamps and Medicaid.

And while a citizenship question might cause political harm to California, Copland said, it could help states like Minnesota and Maine, ``whose representation is diluted by California.''