By Stephan Lefebvre*

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti gives a press conference on the 2020 Census. Garcetti leads a coalition of over 160 U.S. mayors that oppose adding a question about citizenship on the census. / Office of Eric Garcetti / Flickr / Creative Commons

The Trump administration’s plans to add a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S. Census have set the stage for confrontation between Latino/a/x individuals and the U.S. government.  Community groups, civil rights organizations, a group of 18 U.S. states, and others are challenging the administration in court – oral arguments for the first of six legal challenges began last Friday.  Grassroots organizing around Latinx statistical disobedience is also under way, urging individuals to respond to the citizenship question randomly, without regard to their own status, to make the results unusable.

• The legal challenges have yielded documents revealing the discriminatory intent of the citizenship question. Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas known for his anti-immigrant views and inaccurate claims about voter fraud, wrote to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in July 2017 advocating the citizenship question.  Kobach said – falsely – it was necessary to deal with the “problem that aliens who do not actually ‘reside’ in the United States are still counted for congressional apportionment purposes.”  Several months later, the U.S. Justice Department issued a “formal request” to the acting director of the Census Bureau to include the citizenship question to attain data “critical to the Department’s enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and its important protections against racial discrimination in voting.”  Claiming the measure is necessary to prevent “vote dilution” among minority groups, it is very different from the alleged problem Kobach identified.  Representation in the U.S. Congress is based on total population, not total voting population, as confirmed in 2016 unanimously by the Supreme Court in Evenwel v. Abbott.
• It is still not clear where the idea for a citizenship question on the 2020 Census came from, but its purpose – to weaponize the census to be used against Latina/o/x and other undocumented communities – has been clear from the start. Kobach has said that his advocacy was informed by conversations with Steve Bannon, the far-right activist and former senior advisor to President Trump.  Secretary Ross initially testified to Congress that the proposal for a citizenship question was initiated by the Justice Department, but he later issued a memo contradicting this when documents came to light showing his earlier involvement.

Census Bureau testing of the 2020 Census questionnaire indicates that there is deep concern among the undocumented and Latinx communities.  Field staff conducting interviews report many red flags.  In presentations made during a meeting of the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations, Census Bureau documents quote one interviewer saying, “There was a cluster of mobile homes, all Hispanic. I went to one and I left the information on the door.  I could hear them inside.  I did two more interviews, and when I came back, they were moving. … It’s because they were afraid of being deported.”  In another case, a Spanish-speaking respondent said, “The possibility that the census could give my information to [U.S. government] internal security, and immigration could come and arrest me for not having documents terrifies me.”  In response, community-engaged scholars like Angelo Falcón of the National Institute for Latino Policy are calling for “statistical disobedience,” the willful misrepresentation of one’s legal status.

If the six legal challenges to the citizenship question fail, the prospects of statistical disobedience will be high.  Falsifying responses on the census is a punishable offense, but some community leaders have argued that if the Latinx statistical disobedience is widespread, enforcement will be highly unlikely.  This is not unlike other acts of historical civil disobedience.  The grassroots campaign behind statistical disobedience not only helps prevent the citizenship question from being used to target undocumented and Latinx communities; it can also drive up participation and awareness of the 2020 Census by Latinx communities who have been historically under counted.  Community leaders want to be ready.

August 21, 2018

* Stephan Lefebvre is a Ph.D. student in Economics at American University studying stratification economics.  His forthcoming article in the journal Diálogo is titled “Bold Policies for Puerto Rico: A Blueprint for Transformative, Justice-Centered Recovery.”