The citizenship question that Donald Trump’s Justice Department wants added to the 2020 census without adequate field testing or any calls to add it from affected communities, to be administered by a notorious gerrymanderer, will … go figure, likely benefit Republicans by skewing toward rural areas:
A majority of the nation’s undocumented immigrants live in just 20 metropolitan areas, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center study of Census Bureau data, numbering about 1 million in the New York and Los Angeles areas, 575,000 in Houston and 475,000 in Dallas.
That makes urban leaders, mostly Democrats, alarmed by the possibility of the citizenship question — primarily because census data help guide the distribution of more than $675 billion a year in federal funding.
“The Justice Department’s proposal to request citizenship status as part of the census is extremely damaging to the ability to secure an accurate count,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said in a statement to The Washington Post.
The census is supposed to count everyone, not just citizens, but if non-citizens won’t talk to census-takers—and there’s already ample proof that’s going to be a problem in 2020 even without a citizenship question—then the areas with more undocumented immigrants will be drastically undercounted, affecting not just federal funding but reapportionment and redistricting of House seats. Just one more way Republicans are looking to cheat their way into continuing control of government because they’re afraid they can’t win in a fair election.