Last March, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross forwarded to Congress a list of proposed questions to be included in the United States 2020 census, including an item asking respondents about their citizenship status.
Secretary Ross's announcement provoked lawsuits from 17 states, several cities, and a coalition of civil liberties organizations that want the question removed, claiming that it will discourage noncitizens from participating in the census.
To the extent that this happens, the plaintiffs say, the census will produce an undercount of the population in states and cities with large concentrations of immigrants, leading to losses in congressional and state legislative seats in those jurisdictions and parallel losses in federal dollars allocated on the basis of the population count in the census.
One could argue that those seats have been distributed at the expense of several states with far smaller numbers of unauthorized immigrants, such as Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia-all states slated to lose at least one congressional seat following the 2020 census.
Could those states file lawsuits against the House of Representatives or the Bureau of the Census, claiming that they have been harmed by the population formula for allocating congressional seats to the several states? That question could easily arise in response to the 2020 census, particularly if the citizenship question goes forward as planned.
On a deeper level, the controversy over the census raises questions about what the United States is or should be as a nation-state in the modern world.
The New York Times, in an editorial attacking the citizenship question, claims that the Trump administration is trying to "Weaponize the census to redefine American democracy for a narrow set of people. They're trying to fundamentally change what this country is, and aspires to be, by creating different classes of people." The editorial implies that in the United States, no distinctions can be made between citizens and noncitizens-a manifestly false claim, since the right to vote has always been limited to citizens, and most government benefits are similarly restricted to citizens or legal residents.
https://www.city-journal.org/citizenship-and-the-census-16204.html
Secretary Ross's announcement provoked lawsuits from 17 states, several cities, and a coalition of civil liberties organizations that want the question removed, claiming that it will discourage noncitizens from participating in the census.
To the extent that this happens, the plaintiffs say, the census will produce an undercount of the population in states and cities with large concentrations of immigrants, leading to losses in congressional and state legislative seats in those jurisdictions and parallel losses in federal dollars allocated on the basis of the population count in the census.
One could argue that those seats have been distributed at the expense of several states with far smaller numbers of unauthorized immigrants, such as Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia-all states slated to lose at least one congressional seat following the 2020 census.
Could those states file lawsuits against the House of Representatives or the Bureau of the Census, claiming that they have been harmed by the population formula for allocating congressional seats to the several states? That question could easily arise in response to the 2020 census, particularly if the citizenship question goes forward as planned.
On a deeper level, the controversy over the census raises questions about what the United States is or should be as a nation-state in the modern world.
The New York Times, in an editorial attacking the citizenship question, claims that the Trump administration is trying to "Weaponize the census to redefine American democracy for a narrow set of people. They're trying to fundamentally change what this country is, and aspires to be, by creating different classes of people." The editorial implies that in the United States, no distinctions can be made between citizens and noncitizens-a manifestly false claim, since the right to vote has always been limited to citizens, and most government benefits are similarly restricted to citizens or legal residents.
https://www.city-journal.org/citizenship-and-the-census-16204.html
No comments:
Post a Comment