Thread: Immigration Debate Boils Over to Census

October 12, 2009 5:30 PM
Immigration Debate Boils Over to Census

Posted by Stephanie Condon

President Obama has yet to take on immigration reform, but the status of undocumented immigrants in the United States will become a hot topic again soon enough as a result of the 2010 census count.

Some Latino groups angered by the president's lack of action on immigration reform are calling for a boycott of the census to prove the Hispanic community's growing political leverage. Other organizations are calling for just the opposite, mobilizing to ensure that the growing minority group is accurately counted.

Meanwhile, two Republican senators will try this week to add questions regarding citizenship and immigration status to the census. Senators David Vitter (R-La.) and Robert Bennett (R-Utah) recently introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill that would bar funding for the U.S. Census Bureau unless it adds the questions to the nation's survey of the U.S. population, which takes place every ten years.

The census will have an enormous impact on communities, influencing the number of congressional representatives they get and the amount of federal dollars they receive for public works projects like roads and schools. The challenge of counting all of the nation's residents will be even more difficult next year, now that cities are dealing with depleted budgets and will have to seek out citizens who have become homeless or displaced by their own financial hardship.

The census counts everyone who lives in the country, legally or otherwise. For the first time, bilingual English-Spanish census questionnaires will be sent to about 13 million households next year.

Given that communities are granted power and money based on their population, one Latino leader is arguing that local governments should not receive those benefits unless leaders intend to represent all of their residents, including illegal immigrants.

Rev. Miguel Rivera, president of the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, wants illegal immigrants to boycott the census, the Washington Times reports.

"The truth is that counting undocumented immigrants creates what we call ghost electoral districts, and that is completely immoral," he told the newspaper.

The San Francisco-based Latin American Alliance for Immigrant Rights is also calling for a boycott of the census unless Congress acts to legalize undocumented immigrants before the census starts in April, according to the Oakland Tribune.

"We have to send a clear message that we don't want to be used," said Miguel Robles, the group's director. "If these people decide not to be counted, the cities and counties will lose a lot of money."

This position aligns these immigrant rights groups with conservatives they are typically at odds with on the issue of immigration reform.

"We shouldn't let these states be rewarded for skirting our federal laws and this amendment would help stop this practice," Vitter reportedly said when introducing his amendment. "It obviously won't help us identify all illegal aliens, but it's a step in the right direction. Illegal aliens should not be included for the purposes of determining representation in Congress, and that's the bottom line here."

Detractors of the amendment argue it would delay the census; force the government to spend more money for additional testing, printing and training; and make it less accurate.

"In a country of 308 million people, getting a complete headcount is a gargantuan undertaking even when the number of questions (now ten) is small," write Audrey Singer and Andrew Reamer, two fellows with the Metropolitan Policy Program. "Add a bitter politicized environment around immigration and it’s understandable why many immigrants, even those legally present, may not want to stand up to be counted."

Other Latino and immigrant-rights groups strongly disagree with the boycott idea. In fact, a coalition of Latino groups backed by the Census Bureau are running a campaign aimed at achieving a more accurate count of Latinos in the country, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Called "Ya Es Hora. Hagase Contar!" (It's Time, Make Yourself Count!), the campaign is being driven by unions, grassroots organizations and Spanish-language media.

"This is the most important census for the Latino community because it's the first census in which Latinos make up the nation's second-largest population group," Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), told the Washington Times.

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/10/12 ... 0369.shtml

Related
http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-174052-census.html

Senators try to exclude illegal immigrants from 2010 Census
by Haya El Nasser, USA TODAY
1 hr 49 min ago

A controversial amendment that would require the Census Bureau to ask for the first time whether people are in the USA illegally is headed for a Senate vote Wednesday.

Proposed last week by Republican Sens. David Vitter of Louisiana and Bob Bennett of Utah, the amendment would exclude illegal immigrants from the population count used to allocate congressional seats after the 2010 Census. It also would require the Census to ask people whether they are citizens.

"Illegal aliens should not be included for the purposes of determining representation in Congress, and that's the bottom line here," Vitter says. If enacted, the amendment to an appropriations bill would stop funding of the 2010 Census unless the changes are made.

The amendment comes less than six months before 2010 Census questionnaires are mailed to 135 million households. About 425 million forms have already been printed, according to the bureau. Some are in different languages; others are duplicates that will go to houses that do not respond to the first mailing.

The Census Bureau is launching an outreach campaign to persuade Americans that next year's national head count will be a simple, painless process.

The "Take 10" campaign promotes the idea that the Census form has only 10 questions and should take just 10 minutes to answer. Adding questions would require designing new forms. "It's operationally impossible," says Steve Jost, Census associate communications director. "The forms are printed, folded. We have bilingual forms. ... We're printing 1.5 million forms a day."

By law, the Census is taken April 1. State population counts must be submitted to the president the following Dec. 31 so that seats in the House of Representatives can be apportioned.

Since the first Census in 1790, the bureau has routinely asked in various surveys whether people are native-born or foreign-born, but it has never asked about legal status.

Immigrants often are the hardest to count because many mistrust government, especially if they are in the USA illegally. Crackdowns on illegal immigration at the border and at work sites have made outreach for next year's Census even more challenging.

Some Latino groups such as the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders are calling for immigrants to boycott the Census unless laws are changed to give those here illegally a chance to gain legal status.

"Already the public fears that the Census is too intrusive," says Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, which opposes both the amendment and the boycott.

"Asking about citizenship status "would raise more questions in the public mind about how confidential the Census is," Vargas says.

www.usatoday.com

Census Bureau knocks Sen. David Vitter's proposal to ask about immigration status
By Jonathan Tilove
October 13, 2009, 11:03PM

The Commerce Department and Census Bureau declared Tuesday that an amendment by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., to require the 2010 census to ask all persons their citizenship and immigration status would scuttle any chance that the census could be done on time and would cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

The warning came even as the Senate Democratic leadership sought to head off a vote on the Vitter amendment to the Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill. An effort by the leadership to invoke cloture failed Tuesday evening, with the fight over whether to vote on the Vitter amendment, which he co-sponsored with Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, expected to resume today.

Vitter portrays his amendment as a last-ditch effort to protect the political power of Louisiana and other states with relatively small populations of people who are either not citizens or are not legal residents in the United States, and keep Louisiana from losing one of its seven congressional districts in the coming reapportionment.

The decennial census, required by the Constitution to count all "persons," is used for the purposes of congressional apportionment and legislative redistricting. The result is that places with more people -- regardless of their status -- get more representation.

Or as Vitter put it in floor debate on his amendment last week, "States that have large populations of illegals would be rewarded for that. Other states, including my home state of Louisiana, would be penalized."

Vitter said that in addition to Louisiana, the states of Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania and South Carolina "would lose out." He challenged the senators from those states, "if you vote against this amendment, then you are voting against the interests of your state."

By far the biggest winner under the existing system is California, followed by Texas, New York and Florida.

But opponents of the measure described it as ill-advised, and in its intent, both unconstitutional and discriminatory.

The Census Bureau, and the Commerce Department of which it is a part, said that 425 million of the 600 million census forms already had been printed, and that even adding an addenda sheet with the Vitter question also would require rewriting software code, reprogramming scanners and retraining census workers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

A statement released this week by six former census directors also noted that the bureau also would have to scrap its $400 million outreach and promotional campaign built on the simplicity of the census short form's 10 questions, a campaign that in many cases also explicitly promises that the form does not ask about immigration status.

Adding this new question now, they wrote, "would put the accuracy of the enumeration in all communities at risk."

The fear is that households in which some folks are not legal will avoid enumerators, who then also will miss the legal people, including American-born children, living in the same household.

But perhaps, said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, that is the point.

"It's intended to suppress the count of Latinos, " said Vargas, a member of the Census Advisory Committee who was in New Orleans Tuesday to talk to foundation representatives about the census.

Under the amendment, the census still would be obliged to count everyone, but the additional information about citizenship and legal status then could be used to adjust the number that is used for the purpose of apportionment and redistricting, a move that would inevitably wind up before the Supreme Court for constitutional adjudication.

Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, said that as a practical matter, the Vitter-Bennett amendment comes too late, but that "Vitter's concern is legitimate" and Louisianians are "right to worry" about a loss of power the way the current count is applied to reapportionment.

Camarota noted that, according to 2009 Current Population Survey, there are about 21.3 million noncitizens among the nation's 305 million people. About half that 21.3 million are living here legally and about half are not. But, because those populations tend to be more concentrated in certain states, those states gain political power in ways that, he said, raise legitimate questions about democratic representation. In a study a few years ago, Camarota found that while in some states it took 100,000 votes to get elected to Congress, in a couple of districts in California, there were so few citizens that a candidate could get elected with 35,000 votes.

"We're losing a member of Congress because of this, " said Elliott Stonecipher, a pollster and demographic analyst from Shreveport, who has written extensively on the subject. While Stonecipher supports adding the citizenship question to the short form, he does not think it is a good idea to ask about legal status, which he feared would "suppress response."

Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA, which supports lower immigration levels, said the group supports Vitter-Bennett because its members think that the power that accrues to communities whose population is inflated by those who are not in the country legally, "leads local and state officials to protect their illegal populations."

www.nola.com