The administration of President Donald Trump is attempting a major overhaul of the United States census, submitting a proposal that would exclude some noncitizens from the population count. Under the proposal, released by the Department of Commerce on Wednesday, US citizens and lawful permanent residents would be counted in the census. Other foreign nationals, however, including people with temporary legal status and immigrants without documentation, would be excluded. Population counts have wide-ranging purposes, determining the allocation of everything from government resources to seats in the House of Representatives.
The proposal also suggests eliminating certain questions on race and ethnicity from the questionnaire, citing “substantial doubts about the meaning, significance, and impact” of such categories and questioning their ongoing “usefulness”. “For all these reasons, the Census Bureau is re-evaluating the proper role of these demographic questions,” the proposal reads. It continues by arguing that limiting the questions would boost participation in the census, which is mandated every 10 years. “Reducing response burden is expected to increase response rate and thus improve the Census Bureau’s record linkage efforts and also enable the Census Bureau to obtain a more complete population count directly from respondents, which helps ensure fairer political representation,” it said. The census proposal is one of several Trump administration initiatives that could reshape electoral power, alongside congressional redistricting and mail-in ballot restrictions. The proposal says undocumented immigrants and other foreign nationals who lack a sufficiently durable legal status should not be included because they are not “true inhabitants” and lack a sufficient “tie and allegiance” to the US.
The change would be a departure from historical precedent. The 1790 Census Act instructed government workers to count anyone who has a “usual place of abode” in the US, regardless of citizenship status. Wednesday’s proposal also seeks to verify how people list their citizenship status on the census questionnaire. Already, it is a federal crime to lie on the census.
But Wednesday’s proposal suggests cross-referencing responses about citizenship with other government records, including files from the Department of Homeland Security and Treasury, which oversees the government’s tax collection agency. It would also add questions about legal immigration status to the short-form questionnaire. Trump had sought to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census during his first term, but in 2019, the Supreme Court blocked the effort after finding that the administration’s rationale appeared “contrived”. Critics fear such questions could be used to drive Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which he has promised will be the largest in US history.
It could also drive down participation in the census, which would then distort key information about US communities, risking their access to resources. Beyond congressional representation, census data is used in formulas that determine the allocation of federal assistance. The Census Bureau reported that census data was used to distribute more than $2.8 trillion in federal funding in fiscal year 2021. William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a public policy nonprofit, said the proposal goes beyond changing how the census is conducted. “The administration is trying to change the idea of who is American,” Frey told Al Jazeera.
Frey warns the proposal could have a broader chilling effect on census participation, even if it fails. “That’s the scary part,” Frey said. “The administration has been trying to keep certain segments of the population from fully participating in the government. So it is quite damaging even if these proposals don’t come to fruition.” The Justice Department warned on September 2 that states could lose billions of dollars in welfare funding if they fail to report immigrants known by state agencies to be in the country without documentation. The US Census Bureau did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
