The Citizenship Census Question is Actually a Pretty Good Idea

There's a lot of controversy over the "are you a US citizen" census question being blocked in court (at the time of this article). Let's look at that.

What is the point of the question? More granular information probably isn't a bad thing. It can't hurt. Asking who is or isn't a citizen won't affect anything else, and the question does not ask if they are in the country legally.

What is the argument against it? Democrats (they are the ones who are legally blocking the question, or trying to) claim that it will cause immigrants (non-citizens, and non-citizens in the country illegally in particular, rather than naturalized immigrants) to try to dodge the census, reducing representation in many government functions. Cities with many illegal (or undocumented, but that takes longer to type so deal with it) immigrants would in theory receive a lower proportion of federal funds and a lower proportion of electoral votes, state representatives, etc., than they might otherwise.

Why might that be a bad thing? Schools and hospitals and other government-funded or partially government-funded entities serving both legal and illegal immigrants alike would receive fewer resources despite the greater number of people to serve, assuming individuals refused to return or answer a survey. This could negatively impact those in the country legally, both citizen and immigrant alike.

But that's not the whole story. An often-repeated phrase is that it is somehow desirable or necesary to "make our city/state/fill-in-the-blank more welcoming to all our residents," conveniently not mentioning that many of those residents are being paid under the table rather than contributing to tax revenue, are not supposed to live in the United States in the first place. Would you welcome someone who wasn't supposed to be in your home and didn't care about that? Perhaps you would for a time. But you wouldn't want them to move in permanently. And those who are not supposed to be in the US, but are anyway, should absolutely be discounted from political representation, else it would be in each state's best interest to import as many as possible for political gain and damn the consequences like rising crime, skyrocketing housing costs and shortages, and decreased resources for students.

What happens next? I hope the Supreme Court rules that illegal immigrants who refuse to fill out a census form shouldn't be represented at all, uphold the question, and that's that. But it may be possible that the Supreme Court rules a more accurate census is preferable to a more precise census.

NBC reports that "Because the citizenship question would depress minority responses, the challengers said, including it on the form would actually produce a less accurate count than leaving it off and using Social Security and IRS data to supplement the information gathered from the census form." Gathering the information via social security is an interesting idea, but would lead to the exact same undercount assuming that each social security number was filed once. I suspect the IRS data would produce the same undercount. If an undercount is inevitable, as it seems to be, then let it be not because of a legal block but because those not being represented willingly abandoned that representation.

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