Adding a citizenship question to the census reduces the participation of non-U.S. citizens, particularly those from Latin American countries, according to a new research report that comes as Republicans in Congress push to add such a question to the census form.
Noncitizens who pay taxes but are not eligible for a Social Security number are less likely to complete the census questionnaire or more likely to provide incomplete answers to the form when it asks about citizenship. This could exacerbate the undercounting of some groups, according to a report published this summer by researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau and the University of Kansas.
Other groups responded less sensitively to the addition of a citizenship question, such as U.S.-born Hispanic residents and non-Hispanic Americans, the study found.
The document comes as Republican lawmakers in Congress insist on requiring a citizenship question on the questionnaire for the once-a-decade census. Their purpose is to exclude non-citizens from the count that helps determine political power and the distribution of federal funds in the United States. The 14th Amendment requires that all people be counted in the census, not just citizens.
In May, the GOP-led House passed a bill that would eliminate noncitizens from the count collected during a census used to determine how many House seats and Electoral College votes each state gets. The bill is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate. Separately, the House will consider it in the coming weeks a budget law with similar language aimed at excluding people who are in the country illegally the census used to redraw political districts.
During a debate earlier this month at a meeting of the House Budget Committee, Democratic U.S. Rep. Grace Meng of New York described efforts to exclude people in the country illegally as “an extreme proposal” that would undermine the accuracy of the census.
“Pretending that there are no non-citizens living in our communities would only limit the critical work of the Census Bureau and take resources away from areas that need them most,” Meng said.
But Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia argued that allowing people into the country illegally gives state and local governments an incentive to attract non-citizens so they can gain a larger population and more political power.
“Every non-citizen that is included effectively takes away the ability of citizens to determine who their representatives are,” Clyde said.
The next national census will be in 2030.
In their paper, the Census Bureau and Kansas researchers look back at a study of the impact of a citizenship question on a 2019 pilot survey that the Census Bureau conducted in advance of the 2020 census.
The pilot survey was conducted by the Census Bureau after the Trump administration unsuccessfully attempted to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire. Experts feared a citizenship question would deter Hispanics and immigrants from participating in the 2020 census, whether they were in the country legally or not. Years earlier, a Republican expert on district redrawing had written that it might be advantageous for Republicans and non-Hispanic whites to use the voting age population rather than the total population when redrawing districts.
The question of citizenship was blocked by the Supreme Court in 2019.
As part of the pilot study, test questionnaires were sent by the Census Bureau to 480,000 U.S. households. Half of the questionnaires included a citizenship question and half did not. Preliminary results showed that adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census would not have affected overall response rates, even though previous studies had suggested adding it would reduce participation among Hispanics, immigrants, and noncitizens. Later analyses showed it would have made a difference in bilingual neighborhoods with significant numbers of noncitizens, Hispanics, and Asians.
Rather than focusing on census tracts, which include neighborhoods as in the 2019 study, the new study focuses on individual households, using administrative data.
“Including a question about citizenship increases the number of households with non-citizens,” the researchers concluded.
During the 2020 census, the black population was had a net undercount of 3.3%, while it was nearly 5% for Hispanics and 5.6% for American Indians and Native Alaskans living on reservations. The non-Hispanic white population had a net overcount of 1.6% and Asians had a net overcount of 2.6%, according to 2020 census results.
The count, which takes place once a decade, determines how many congressional seats and electoral college votes each state gets. It also determines the distribution of $2.8 trillion in annual federal spending.
The research paper was produced by the bureau’s Center for Economic Studies, whose papers typically do not undergo the review that other Census Bureau publications receive. The opinions expressed are those of the researchers and not of the statistical agency, the bureau said.
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