Adding a citizenship question to the census reduces the turnout of people who are not U.S. citizens, especially those from Latin American countries, according to a new research paper published as Republicans in Congress push to add such a question to the census. census form.
Noncitizens who pay taxes but are not eligible to have a Social Security number are less likely to fill out the census questionnaire or more likely to give incomplete responses on the form if there is a citizenship question, potentially exacerbating undercounting. some groups, according to the newspaper. released this summer by researchers at the US Census Bureau and the University of Kansas.
Other groups were less sensitive to the addition of a citizenship question, such as U.S.-born Hispanic residents and noncitizens who were not from Latin America, the study said.
The article comes as Republican lawmakers in Congress press to demand a citizenship question in the questionnaire for the annual census. Its purpose is to exclude people who are not citizens from the count that helps determine political power and the distribution of federal funds in the United States. The 14th Amendment requires that all people be counted in the census, not just citizens.
In May, the GOP-led House passed a bill that would eliminate noncitizens from the count collected during a census and used to decide how many House seats and Electoral College votes each state would get. The bill is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate. Separately, the Chamber is expected to consider in the coming weeks an appropriations account containing similar language seeking to omit people illegally in the country of the count used to redraw political districts.
During debate earlier this month at a House Appropriations Committee meeting, Democratic U.S. Rep. Grace Meng of New York described efforts to exclude people illegally in the country as “an extreme proposal” that would undermine the accuracy of the census.
“Pretending that noncitizens don’t live in our communities would only limit the Census Bureau’s crucial work and take resources away from the areas that need them most,” Meng said.
But Republican U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia argued that illegally bringing people into the country gives state and local governments an incentive to attract noncitizens so they can have larger populations and more political power.
“Every noncitizen included actually harms the ability of citizens to determine who their representatives are,” Clyde said.
The next national count will be in 2030.
In their paper, Census Bureau and Kansas researchers revisited a study that assessed the impact of a citizenship question in a 2019 experimental survey that was conducted by the Census Bureau before the 2020 census.
The experimental survey was conducted by the Census Bureau as the Trump administration tried unsuccessfully to add a citizenship question to the 2020 head count questionnaire. Experts feared A citizenship question would exclude Hispanics and immigrants from participating in the 2020 census, whether they are in the country legally or not. Years earlier, a Republican redistricting expert had written that using the population of voting-age citizens rather than the total population for purposes of redrawing congressional and legislative districts could be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.
The question of citizenship It was blocked by the Federal Supreme Court in 2019.
As part of experimental research, test questionnaires were sent by the Census Bureau to 480,000 U.S. households. Half of the questionnaires contained a citizenship question and the other half did not. Preliminary results showed that adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census would not have had an impact on overall response rates, although previous studies had suggested that its inclusion would reduce participation among Hispanics, immigrants and noncitizens. Further analysis showed that this would have made a difference in bilingual neighborhoods that had substantial numbers of noncitizens, Hispanics, and Asians.
Instead of focusing on census tracts, which cover neighborhoods as in the 2019 study, the new study narrowed the focus to individual households, using administrative records.
“The inclusion of a citizenship question increases the undercount of households with non-citizens,” the researchers concluded.
During the 2020 census, the black population had a net undercount of 3.3%, while it was nearly 5% for Hispanics and 5.6% for American Indians and Alaska Natives living on reservations. The non-Hispanic white population had a net excess of 1.6%, and Asians had a net excess of 2.6%, according to 2020 census results.
The once-a-decade head count determines how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets. It also guides the distribution of US$ 2.8 trillion in annual federal spending.
The research article was produced by the agency’s Center for Economic Studies, whose articles typically have not undergone the review given to other Census Bureau publications. The opinions are those of the researchers and not the statistical body, according to the bureau.
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