Citizenship Required on 2020 census

[Belsnickel]

(03-28-2018, 08:59 AM)Griever Wrote: is brown your favorite color?

on topic

what was the reason they stopped asking it in the first place?

(03-28-2018, 09:18 AM)mallorian69 Wrote: Why was the question taken off of the census forms in the first place? From what I can gather it was there every year until 1950.

(03-28-2018, 09:35 AM)GMDino Wrote: https://www.npr.org/2018/03/27/597436512/fact-check-has-citizenship-been-a-standard-census-question

To actually answer the question posed and get to the "why" behind the NPR link, I will attempt an explanation.

The purpose of the census is to allocate resources. Specifically, the Constitution allocates representation in Congress, but it is also used to provide money to states for education, law enforcement, and a plethora of other federally funded programs. For this constitutional purpose, the representation, it is supposed to be a literal headcount of all people within the country. Citizenship is not relevant to this and does more harm to attempts to accurately count the people as it will negatively affect reporting rates.

The long form, and now the ACS, are tools used by demographers to learn more about the country. This is really where the monetary resource allocation is a big thing because it helps us understand growth patterns, etc. Since this is not constitutionally mandated, this happens every 5 years and goes out to a smaller portion. Then, statistical modelling is used to determines trends and so forth. This is actually a more accurate estimate of the people in the country than the actual census because it can take into account the flaws in the headcount system. Anyway, for the purposes of this the citizenship question is not going to cause as much as a negative impact because these social scientists can account for false/non reports in their modelling and the question can be useful in determining certain things.

Until we actually amend the Constitution to allow for modelling in the census information, we need to keep it as simple as possible. The citizenship question does more harm than good for actual census purposes. It is an important question that we need answered, but the mandated decennial census should not be the place for it. Everyone in the Census Bureau would say the same thing, but listening to the experts seems to be a bad thing these days.