Census Test Proves Asking About Citizenship Doesn’t Scare Hispanics

This week, the Census Bureau released the results of its formal test of the once-proposed, and now prevented, census citizenship question. The results are a striking rebuke to a recent leftist orthodoxy: Adding a citizenship question to a test-run of the census had no statistically significant effect on overall response rates. Even in the communities most sensitive to the question, such as neighborhoods with many Hispanics, response rates dropped only slightly.

To understand why this report is significant, step back to March 2018, when Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross announced that the 2020 census would include a question about citizenship status. Leftists were immediately outraged, seeing the addition as a racist conspiracy.

They made three main arguments: The question addition was motivated by racial animus; adding a citizenship question would dramatically reduce Hispanic response rates to the census, resulting in a large under-count; and anything resulting in a foreknown under-count would be an unconstitutional denial of fair representation to citizens of affected states. So their theory ran that the Trump administration added the question knowing or suspecting it would cause a Hispanic under-count, which would result in blue state populations being underestimated, and thus their congressional apportionment reduced after the 2020 census.

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