Thread: The Census Bureau does not ask about legal (migrant) status

https://ask.census.gov/cgi-bin/askcensu ... SZwX2N2PSZ

The Census Bureau does not ask about legal (migrant) status of respondents in any of its survey and census programs. As examples, in the decennial census, the American Community Survey, and Current Population Survey as there is no legislative mandate to collect this information. Given the success of Census 2000 in counting nearly every person residing in the United States, we expect that unauthorized migrants were included among people who indicated that the United States was their usual place of residence on the survey date. The foreign-born population includes naturalized U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, temporary migrants (e.g., foreign students), humanitarian migrants (e.g., refugees), and unauthorized migrants (people illegally present in the United States).

I did not know this. This is one more fix action we need to advocate for, and it is critical. Census information is used not only to determine the number of representatives each state gets in the House of Representatives (population goes up a lot, state gets more reps and vice versa), which is important enough, but federal judges have used census data in court cases to direct states and municipalities to redistrict to ensure minorities get fair representation. Therefore, a high number of illegal immigrants in a city or state could wind up causing redistricting on behalf of people who are not legally entitled to it.