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Census Bureau’s Own Expert Panel Blasts Decision to Add Citizenship Question Census Bureau’s Own Expert Panel Rebukes Decision to Add Citizenship Question
(about 3 hours later)
A Census Bureau panel of expert advisers on Friday rebuked the Trump administration’s decision to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census, saying the move relied on “flawed logic” and posed a host of potential threats to the accuracy and confidentiality of the head count. 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 on Friday: the experts who advise the Census Bureau itself.
The panel, the Census Scientific Advisory Committee, said the addition of the citizenship question would depress the response to the census and stir a potentially damaging flood of misinformation about the government’s plans for the citizenship information it collects. 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.
The objections were included in a statement to the acting director of the Census Bureau, Ron Jarmin, issued at the end of the panel’s semiannual meeting. The panel, a group of prominent demographers, economists and other experts, advises Mr. Jarmin on census preparations. 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 group’s two-day meeting at the bureau’s headquarters in Suitland, Md., was punctuated by concerns and complaints, some of them anguished, about what the decision would do to the census and to the bureau itself. 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.
“I want to say in no uncertain terms that I think this is an absolutely awful decision,” D. Sunshine Hillygus, a Duke University political scientist and expert on census issues, said at the panel’s first day of deliberation on Thursday. “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. The Twitter commentary is about how this citizenship question is going to be used to target individuals who are not here legally.” 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.
Professor Hillygus noted that a Twitter hashtag, #leaveitblank, already is circulating online, urging people either to refuse to answer the citizenship question or boycott the census. “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, Md. “The Twitter commentary is about how this citizenship question is going to be used to target individuals who are not here legally.”
Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr., whose department includes the Census Bureau, ordered a question about citizenship added to the census on Monday, days before the April 1 deadline to submit a final list of questions to Congress for review. The question had been requested by the Justice Department, which said it needed more detailed citizenship data to better enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Professor Hillygus noted that a Twitter hashtag, #leaveitblank, already is circulating online, urging people to refuse to answer the citizenship question.
Many census experts and civil-liberties groups have criticized the decision, noting that the Voting Rights Act has been enforced for decades without the data the department is requesting. Many critics see the move as an extension of the White House’s hostility toward immigrants and as an attempt to reduce the 2020 population count in immigrant-rich areas that are predominantly Democratic in advance of redistricting in 2021. Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross Jr. ordered the citizenship question added to the census on 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 Mr. Ross’s 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 United States 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, R.I. The panel urged the bureau to immediately begin testing the language of the query, saying that in the current 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,” Mr. 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,” Mr. Olson said, “higher than I can recall in four decennials.”