WASHINGTON: The Trump administration has few realistic options to get a citizenship question onto next year’s census, but by keeping the issue in the public eye it could still trigger an undercount of residents in Democratic-leaning areas, legal and political experts told Reuters.
Constant media coverage linking citizenship and census forms could scare undocumented immigrants away from responding and rally US President Donald Trump’s base to participate, they said. That, in turn, would help redraw voting districts across the country in favour of his Republican party, encouraging the president to pursue a legal battle that he has little chance of winning.
The latest parlay came on Sunday evening, when the US Department of Justice installed a new team of lawyers to handle the last iterations of litigation that has been going on for more than a year.
“Even if the question is (taken) off, if people are tweeting as if it may be a real possibility, it continues to raise fears and depress the count,” said Thomas Wolf, a lawyer who focuses on census issues at the Brennan Center for Justice.
The US Constitution requires the government to count all residents — whatever their legal status — every 10 years. The information collected becomes the basis for voting maps and distributing some $800 billion in federal funds each year.
It is illegal for the Census Bureau to share information about individuals with law enforcement or immigration authorities. But the idea of asking residents about citizenship status has nonetheless stoked fears that the survey would become a tool for the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies.
SUPPORT FOR INCLUSION
The president and his allies have said it is important to know about citizenship status, and characterised the question as something that should not draw controversy.
“So important for our Country that the very simple and basic ‘Are you a Citizen of the United States?’ question be allowed to be asked in the 2020 Census,” the president tweeted on July 4.
A Reuters poll earlier this year also showed 66per cent of Americans support its inclusion. But demographers, advocacy groups, corporations and even the Census Bureau’s own staff have said the citizenship question threatens to undermine the survey.
CONTRIVED RATIONALE
Communities with high immigrant and Latino populations could have low response rates. Researchers have estimated that more than 4 million people out of a total US population of some 330 million may not participate.
That would benefit non-Hispanic whites, a core part of Trump’s support, and help Republicans gain seats in Congress and state legislatures, critics have said. The question seemed dead in June, when the Supreme Court blocked it, saying the administration had given a “contrived” rationale for its inclusion.
However, the high court left open the possibility that the administration could offer a plausible rationale. Department of Justice lawyers said on Friday that they were exploring other explanations. Trump also said he may try to force it into the survey through an executive order.
Legal experts immediately slapped down the ideas. It will be hard to convince justices that a new explanation is not also contrived, and an executive order would not override the Supreme Court decision or undo other court orders blocking the citizenship question, they said. — Reuters
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