www.nytimes.com/…
The New York Times reports that US Commerce Department documents show that the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 US census was decided after immigration hardliners lobbied in favor.
The Kansas secretary of state, Kris W. Kobach, who has taken a strong position against illegal immigration and was appointed by President Trump to a now-defunct panel on voter fraud, had advocated to include the question directly with the secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross, according to the documents. In a July 2017 email to an aide to Mr. Ross, Mr. Kobach said that he had reached out to the secretary a few months earlier “on the direction of Steve Bannon,” then the White House chief strategist.
The documents were released after the attorney generals of 18 states filed a lawsuit against the inclusion of the citizenship question.
The question is being added to the 2020 census after being absent from the forms for 70 years, and despite warnings from numerous scientist and experts that it will lower the response rate of the federal census and end up costing far more as census takers may need to track down those who fail to answer the question or don’t respond to the census at all.
At the heart of the matter is desire of Republicans to drastically reduce the number of immigrants counted by the census, especially undocumented residents of the US and thereby reduce their representation in the US Congress and state legislature. Billions of dollars in the allocation of federal funds are also at stake. States with large numbers of immigrants, such as California, would likely lose representation in Congress.
People who are in the United States without legal paperwork will be reluctant to fill out a census form if it includes a citizenship question out of fear that it could somehow be used by the immigration service to arrest and deport them. Others may feel question is an unnecessary intrusion into their personal business. The US constitution requires a census every 10 years for reapportionment, and requires a count of all people.
As the constitution says “Counting the whole number of persons”...not citizens only.
The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years."[1][2] Section 2 of the 14th Amendment states: "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed
en.wikipedia.org/…
More:
www.cnn.com/…
www.vox.com/...