The census is the catalyst of American public policy.
It shapes voting districts
and it determines how your public schools will get funded. Because this
data is used in myriad democratic and economic functions it's critical that we
get it right.
Unfortunately the 2020 edition might be
in trouble, which has caused concern among experts for the integrity of the
country's most authoritative dataset.
The census is centuries old, but this story starts at the conclusion of the
2010 census. The Bureau had shot past cost estimates on its way to the most
expensive census per capita of all time. So in 1970 it cost $16 to count each
housing unit and in 2010 it cost around 92 dollars to count each housing unit.
This is all in 2020 dollars. That's Robert Goldenkoff.
His office redid the
2020 census on its list of government initiatives at a high risk of failure.
A key reason? The funding just isn't there.
Congress limited the budget for the 2020
census to the amount spent on the 2010 census.
The nation is getting more
complex and less willing to participate in the census and because the
Constitution requires a complete count, the Census Bureau has to do more work in
order to obtain that complete count.
So why might it cost more to count certain groups?
This scene from an episode of Master Of None gives some clues.
It follows a cab driver back to his apartment, where he's living with at
least three other adult men. So this one apartment contains four distinct
households in New York City, a region of notoriously hard to count tracts.
Census tracts are designated "hard to count" for many reasons.
They could be
full of renters or they could have an abundant homeless population.
Topographically complex regions are hard to count, as are tracts with limited
access to broadband internet.
It's the people at the margins of society.
More impoverished don't speak the language. Then we have procedures to try to
compensate for that. Mr. Prewitt would know about the challenges in taking a census.
He was director during the year 2000 count. The last 2 to 3 percent of the
census is very expensive.
Further complicating matters, a new proposal to
change the census could further increase costs and effect response rates.
The Department of Justice requested that the bureau add a question about citizenship
to the short-form decennial census.
The argument in the letter is that the
Justice Department wants better data on where citizens are in the country,
in order to enforce the voting rights laws.
The citizenship question already appears
in the American Community Survey which collects data annually.
It just goes to a much smaller portion of the country. I can only do
consequences and I can say the consequences of acting as if you need
this for the Voting Rights Act is inconsistent with the fact that it
already exists.
A more complete dataset on citizenship could give the Department
of Justice more granular data to work with, but that would depend on an
adequate response rate and the national political climate might make that more difficult.
Some people have expressed fear that the government might use
census data to aid deportations or otherwise harm the communities.
We have experienced in American history where being counted in the census did
result in painful consequences for the Japanese, who were interned.
Americans today have a historically low level of trust with their government. That fact
paints an unsettling portrait.
Certainly today's environment, if you told the
authorities where a lot of undocumented people live, the
authorities would I think take advantage of that piece of information. That's
their job.
I think the chances of having anything like a complete census, if we
have the citizenship question is simply not the case.
There are proponents who favor a mainstream citizenship question. The
general argument is that census data are used to apportion seats in Congress and
distribute funds, but the Constitution requires the census to count for all
persons. That's because the census is a survey of an economy that includes the
contributions of residents who aren't citizens. The stakes are whether we care
about about a representative democracy. The inequality's, already economic
inequalities are severe if you duplicate economic inequalities with political
inequalities, then you simply have a different kind of society and it's not
a democracy.
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