Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Trump Climbs Down on Census Citizenship Question
Donald Trump and his minions wanted to add a question to next April's US census form asking respondents about their citizenship status. As their own records prove, the idea was to under-count brown and black residents to enable greater gerrymandering to the benefit of the whiter Republican electorate. The Supreme Court struck this down last week, offering a chance to allow the question if a better reason existed. Mr. Trump yesterday signed an executive order demanding all government agencies provide documentation of citizenship to the Commerce Department. He claimed he was getting the information by other means. It was a fig-leaf because it was never really about getting the information; it was about under-counting minorities through intimidation.
The census in the United States has never focused solely on citizens. From the first in 1790, for instance, slaves were constitutionally mandated to count as 3/5 of a person for purposes of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives. There have been questions about citizenship in the past but not since 1950. In that census, respondents were asked where they were born, and if born abroad, had they been naturalized or not, or were they American citizens board abroad. For 70 years, no such question has been on the form.
As a matter of social science, data about citizenship, naturalization rates and legal status would be excellent to have and to use. There is nothing wrong, per se, in the government collecting the facts. What was objectionable was the intent of the question in the first place. If it deters respondents from filling in the form and returning it to the Commerce Department, then it undermines the value of all the data collected. A partial count is a bad count
The New York Times wrote, "Government experts predicted that asking the question would result in many immigrants refusing to participate in the census, leading to an undercount of about 6.5 million people. That could reduce Democratic representation when congressional districts are allocated in 2021 and affect how hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending are distributed."
Of course, the reason for counting people and not citizens only is simple. Everyone in the US, regardless of citizenship, uses public facilities. People carrying Belgian, Bolivian and Botswanan passports who are in America legally use the roads, the sewers, the schools, the electrical grid and the rest of the country's infrastucture. When one is stuck in traffic, every driver regardless of nationality is in the same boat.
"We are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population," Mr. Trump said in the Rose Garden announcing his unconditional surrender to the Supreme Court. As the New York Times reported, "rather than carry on the fight over the census, he said he was issuing an executive order instructing federal departments and agencies to provide the Census Bureau with citizenship data from their 'vast' databases immediately. Even that order appears to merely reiterate plans the Commerce Department announced last year, making it less a new policy than a means of covering Mr. Trump's retreat from the composition of the 2020 census form."
The real question is just how good are the data in those databases. The Social Security Administration, for example, has to make so many corrections every day that official government forms exist to update such mundane things as dates of birth, which calls into question the accuracy of all the data.
Then, there is the additional question of whether the inept Trump administration can make any use whatsoever about the data collected, regardless of its accuracy. Never before has the term "garbage in, garbage out" been more apt.
© Copyright 2019 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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