Blog Post 4.3 - "This Week in Civil Rights"

1. A new question will ask which members of a household are US citizens. 
2. Asking about citizenship will provide more information about the people in the United States, and more information is good. This question had been in every census except the 2010 census. 
3. People believe that the Trump administration will not use that data for good reasons but is instead part of a movement to bring America back to before the civil rights era. The question might also scare people away from answering the census. 
4. The count would be decreased if they don't answer, which means their congressional apportionment and federal funding would be smaller.
5. Federal law prevents the Census Bureau from sharing information. 
6. The administration is right that the question used to be part of the census, because it was part of the long-form census until very recently. However, its critics are also correct because it was not part of the short-form census, so the majority of respondents did not answer that question since the 1950's. Basically, it's been on one form of the census every time except 2010, but it has not been on the mandatory census since 1950.
7.  The DOJ says it needs to know where eligible voters, specifically eligible minority voters, live to better enforce the Voting Rights Act. Therefore, they need to know who is a citizen. 
8. In 2016 and 2017, the Census Bureau could not conduct field tests because Congress did not properly fund them. 
9. Democrats are worried that many Latinos will be worried that their data will be shared and therefore won't respond to the census, further marginalizing that population and decreasing Democratic seats in Congress. 
10. There is an initial mailed census survey, and then census takers visit individual houses that did not respond to the initial survey up to six times. If that didn't work, then they would get information from neighbors, or they would assume that the household looks like the nearest available neighbor.
11. African-Americans, and particularly African-American men, are typically undercounted, as are Latinos. 
12. Usually, census questions go through a pretesting process, but the 2020 census is already past that stage, meaning the question probably missed that entire process.