Census Bureau’s Own Expert Panel Rebukes Decision to Add Citizenship Question

The Trump administration’s decision to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census, already the target of lawsuits and broad criticism by statistics authorities, drew a new opponent Friday: the experts who advise the Census Bureau itself.

Those experts — prominent demographers, economists, engineers and others who make up the Census Scientific Advisory Committee — said in a statement that the decision was based on “flawed logic,” could threaten the accuracy and confidentiality of the head count and likely would make it more expensive to conduct.

In the statement, addressed to the acting Census Bureau director, Ron Jarmin, the committee also said it worried about the “implications for attitudes about the Census Bureau,” an allusion to fears that the latest move jeopardized the bureau’s nonpartisan reputation.

The citizenship question had been requested earlier this year by the Justice Department, which said it needed more detailed citizenship data to better enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But civil-liberties and voting-rights groups have noted that the Voting Rights Act has been enforced for decades without such data.

Many of them say they see the move as an extension of the White House’s hostility toward immigrants — and as an attempt to depress the 2020 population count in immigrant-rich and predominantly Democratic areas in advance of redistricting in 2021.

“Because it is viewed as a strictly political decision, I think it doesn’t matter how much the Census Bureau says we will keep your data confidential,” D. Sunshine Hillygus, a Duke University political scientist and census scholar who sits on the panel, said Thursday at the committee’s semiannual meeting in Suitland, Maryland. “The Twitter commentary is about how this citizenship question is going to be used to target individuals who are not here legally.”

Hillygus noted that a Twitter hashtag, #leaveitblank, already is circulating online, urging people to refuse to answer the citizenship question.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr. ordered the citizenship question added to the census Monday, days before the April 1 deadline to submit a final list of questions to Congress for review. In a lengthy explanation, he said there was no “definitive, empirical support” for concerns that the question would cause noncitizens or legal immigrants to avoid filling out the census.

He also noted that the general census had included a citizenship question as recently as 1950, and that the question was still asked in the American Community Survey, which the Census Bureau takes among a small segment of residents. Because the wording of the question will be taken from that survey, he stated, there was no need to give it the extensive, often yearslong testing given all other census queries.

In its statement, the scientific advisory panel said Ross’ analysis was based on “data collected in a different data collection context, in a different political climate, before anti-immigrant attitudes were as salient and consequential” as they are today. The members also challenged his decision to forgo testing the question’s wording, saying it reflected different motivations and uses in the American Community Survey — including a reference to U.S. territories that would appear “puzzling” on the 2020 census.

The last-minute decision to include the citizenship question prevented the bureau from putting it on its only full trial run of the head count, which began this month in Providence County, Rhode Island. The panel urged the bureau to immediately begin testing the language of the query, saying that in the charged atmosphere surrounding foreign-born residents, the question could lead respondents to misstate or avoid answering other questions about race and ethnicity. The committee worried as well that whatever citizenship data the bureau collected might inadvertently compromise the confidentiality of those who provided it. Federal law bars the bureau from releasing any information that specifically identifies respondents, and the bureau’s record of keeping data private is spotless. But the only citizenship data that is currently collected, from the American Community Survey, is aggregated into large parcels called census block groups.

In contrast, citizenship data collected in 2020 will be reported down to the bureau’s smallest geographic unit, called census blocks, which can be as small as an apartment building. So while individuals’ responses to the question would remain nominally private, block data could allow others to target small areas where noncitizens are reported to live.

Senior census bureau officials at the committee’s meetings carefully avoided criticizing the decision to add the citizenship question, but at the same time admitted that they did not know how much — or even how — it would affect the head count. The bureau is polling 50,000 households and conducting 42 focus groups with minorities and other slices of the population to learn their attitudes toward the census. But “there’s a lot of uncertainty,” Jarmin said. “There’s no way of really testing what it’s going to look like.”

While community organizations and minority groups have made their fears about the question clear, said Timothy Olson, the bureau’s associate director for field operations, some census offices have also seen shows of support, including an “unheard-of” 400 job applications received in one day.

“Regardless of how you feel about it, it has elevated the awareness of 2020 to the population,” Olson said, “higher than I can recall in four decennials.”