Idaho could lose $13M if the Supreme Court allows 2020 census citizenship question
Are you a U.S. citizen? The question is simple, but the ramifications are huge.
The Supreme Court will decide this week if that controversial citizenship question can be added to the 2020 Census. If the question is added, Idaho could lose millions in federal funds.
The Trump administration’s plan to add that seemingly simple query to the 2020 Census has turned the upcoming headcount into the most debated in decades, triggering federal lawsuits and congressional fights amid predictions of undercounts, and sending officials diving into their databases to see if their state might gain money and power ... or lose it.
The stakes are high. The census count helps determine how federal funds from 55 major spending programs get distributed to states, communities and households annually for the next decade. In 2016, those funds totaled around $883 billion.
In Idaho, that means $13 million in federal funds is on the line. Idaho doesn’t have as many noncitizens as other states. Census figures show 3.7 percent of Idaho residents were noncitizens between 2013 and 2017, much lower than the national average.
But according to the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy, the census was the basis for allocating $3.6 billion in federal funding to Idaho during 2016. That comes out to about $2,200 per Idaho resident that year. Most of that money goes to low-income residents via programs like Medicaid and food stamps.
Idaho was one of the fastest-growing states in the country for the past two years. Hispanics accounted for more than a quarter of Idaho’s growth in the last decade, according to the McClure Center for Public Policy Research’s analysis of Census Bureau data.
“If the estimate is supposed to show just how much we’ve grown, but we undercount a significant part of that population, everybody in the state will lose funding,” said Gabe Osterhout, a researcher at Boise State University’s Idaho Policy Institute. “That will be a strain on state resources.”
Almost 25,000 noncitizens live in Ada and Canyon counties. Higher percentages of noncitizens live in sparsely populated counties in East Idaho and the Magic Valley. More than 21 percent of Clark County residents are noncitizens, while at least 10 percent of the populations of Jerome, Lincoln and Minidoka counties are not citizens.
If one-tenth of Idaho’s 61,000 noncitizens skipped the census due to the citizenship question, it would result in an undercount of about 6,000 residents.
Will Hispanics skip the Census?
That’s a likely scenario, according to Idaho experts and immigrant advocates.
Margie Gonzalez, the executive director of the Idaho Commission on Hispanic Affairs, said it’s already difficult to reach Idaho’s Hispanic residents, especially in the rural parts of state. The addition of a citizenship question would definitely lead to an undercount of Idaho Hispanics, Gonzalez said.
“Some people, even those who are citizens, take offense to the citizenship question,” Gonzalez said. “There’s already a distrust.”
A skewed count also could tilt the balance on upcoming federal reapportioning of new House districts. California, the state with the highest estimated percentage of noncitizens, could lose a seat, and Texas may not get as many additional seats as expected. Montana may gain a seat.
That in turn affects Electoral College votes, which are based on each state’s count of House and Senate seats. California and New York among others have sued to block the administration from asking the question. A lower court loss in the New York lawsuit prompted Trump’s Commerce Department to petition the Supreme Court earlier in January.
The high court is expected to rule soon. Census day, April 1, 2020, is looming. Census forms will be distributed in March.
Under the Trump plan, a person living alone will be asked eight questions on the census form, including name, address, age and race. The final question will be: “Are you a citizen of the United States?”
Householders, such as parents, will be asked to answer a similar question for everyone living in their residence: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”
Under Title 13 of the U.S. Code, the Census Bureau is required to keep respondent information confidential, and answers cannot be used against respondents in court or by government agencies such as immigration officials.
The Census Bureau will, however, publish data showing how many noncitizens live in each neighborhood. Some noncitizens are unauthorized immigrants. Others are here legally as permanent residents with Green Cards, or with temporary work visas, or under other protected legal status.
Basim Elkarra of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said Muslim Americans may feel caught in a bind. If they fail to fill out the census, they are not counted, but if they fill it out and skip that question, the result could be scarier: “Someone is going to come knocking on your door, and that is going to make the process worse.”
Where did the 2020 Census controversy come from?
The controversy stems from a decision announced by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in a March 26, 2018, memo.
Ross wrote that the federal government needs to know at the block level how many residents are citizens and how many are noncitizens to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act and “provide complete and accurate data” to protect minority population voting rights.
Ross noted that neither the Census Bureau nor stakeholders have documented that “the response rate would in fact decline materially.”
“While there is widespread belief among many parties that adding a citizenship question could reduce response rates, the Census Bureau’s analysis did not provide definitive, empirical support for that belief,” he wrote.
Nevertheless, he said, the bureau would put the citizenship question last, to reduce chances of impacting response rates.
In making the decision, Ross essentially bypassed the opinions of Census Bureau researchers. Chief scientist John Abowd, in a memo, had warned that adding the question “harms the quality of the census count.”
In another analysis, Census Bureau economist J. David Brown said the citizenship question “would lead to lower self-response rates in households potentially containing noncitizens, resulting in higher fieldwork costs and a lower-quality population count.”
The American Statistical Association and other sociologists and demographers accused Ross of abandoning scientific principles. In an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, they wrote that adding a question without careful testing “is grossly inconsistent with both statutory mandates and professional norms.”
The controversy took a recent twist when Common Cause and The New York Times published reports indicating that a now-deceased Republican operative, Tom Hofeller, promoted the citizenship question to the Trump administration as a way to tilt redistricting in Republican favor.
The administration disputes that contention, but the discovery has prompted critics to reassert the belief that the citizenship question is a political move.
States with a lot of noncitizens tended to back Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Of the 20 states with the highest proportion of noncitizens, 15 backed Clinton and only five — Texas, Florida, Arizona, Utah and Georgia — backed Trump.
Democrats in Congress have demanded administration officials disclose more about what went behind their decision. Trump invoked executive privilege to deny requested documents. A House committee earlier this month voted to recommend holding Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt.
Republicans say Democrats are promoting conspiracies. They point out this would not be the first time that the Census Bureau has asked the citizenship question. The question was last asked of all residents in the 1950 census. Since then, the bureau has asked the question of a subset of about one-sixth the nation’s residents on what was called the decennial census “long form,” a questionnaire that provided a deeper dive into demographic trends nationally.
The long form was discontinued after the 2000 census. But the bureau has been asking the citizenship question during an annual sample survey of 3 million-plus households called the American Community Survey.
Will the question suppress response?
At the moment, demographers generally agree the citizenship question is likely to suppress response, but there is no consensus on how much.
Osterhout said an Idaho Policy Institute analysis found that roughly the same number of Hispanics or Latinos in Idaho who completed the 2010 census also completed the American Community Survey, which asked the citizenship question. But that doesn’t mean the citizenship question wouldn’t cause any problems in Idaho.
“What they’re missing out on there is that people still fill out the survey, but they’ll either not answer the citizenship question, or you’ll have 30 percent of people misrepresenting their answers,” Osterhout said.
A recent Harvard study warns that a question that might seem innocuous becomes problematic “in an environment where the Trump White House has heavily primed Hispanic distrust in the government.”
It estimated the census could miss more than six million Hispanics nationally, in part because some household heads who fill out the firm will decline to list and identify everyone living in the residence, essentially hiding household members from the government.
Two other recent studies of the citizenship question on the American Community Survey suggest the question does not necessarily lead to honest or accurate answers.
A 2014 study by Penn State and Temple University demographers noted a potential problem: Some noncitizen immigrants are marking themselves as citizens in the American Community Survey. One of the study authors, Jennifer Van Hook, a former Census Advisory Board member, more recently said increasing mistrust of the government will lead to inaccurate results on the 2020 census if the citizenship question is included.
A 2018 study for the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality found decreasing numbers of survey respondents have been answering the citizenship question annually between 2010 and 2016, notably among Asian Americans and Hispanics.
A McClatchy News review found that the number of foreign-born residents who didn’t answer the survey’s citizenship question rose again in 2017, the first year of the Trump presidency.
Georgetown report author Bill O’Hare told McClatchy he believes the citizenship question — along with the fact that the next census will be the first to be conducted mainly online — are two reasons the 2020 Census is the most problematic in decades.
“This is the most difficult census of my lifetime,” he said.
The upshot, according to U.C. Berkeley statistician Phillip Stark, is that the citizenship question could skew 2020 census results enough that it becomes statistically incomparable to the 2010 census.
“You are introducing a new variable making it hard to compare, and (potentially) making the census less suitable for its constitutional purpose.”
The possibility of an undercount in some states, though, is in fact good news in others. When one state shrinks in proportion to the others, it stands to lose federal funding, and vice versa.
Which states could be affected?
California is at most risk. The latest American Community Survey suggests noncitizens account for 13.5 percent of that state’s population, the highest in the country, and nearly double the national 7 percent rate.
Texas, Nevada, New York, New Jersey and Florida, also have noncitizen populations notably above the national average, and face the possibility of diminished percentages of population-based federal funds.
States with lower percentages of noncitizens, such as North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio stand to gain funding.
Nearly half of some communities in sparsely-populated areas like Idaho’s Clark County are Hispanic, and hard for census takers to reach — and that’s without the addition of the citizenship question. There’s not even 911 access in those areas, Gonzalez said, let alone a Spanish radio station to encourage community members to participate in the census.
“I’m really discouraged,” Gonzalez said. “How are we going to pull this off to get an accurate count?”
This story was originally published June 25, 2019 at 5:35 PM.