Noncitizens less likely to participate in census with citizenship question

Adding a citizenship question to the census reduces the participation of people who aren’t U.S. citizens, particularly those from Latin American countries.

Adding a citizenship question to the census reduces the participation of people who aren’t U.S. citizens, particularly those from Latin American countries, according to a new research paper that comes as Republicans in Congress are pushing to add such a question to the census form.

Noncitizens who pay taxes but are ineligible to have a Social Security number are less likely to fill out the census questionnaire or more likely to give incomplete answers on the form if there is a citizenship question, potentially exacerbating undercounts of some groups, according to the paper released this summer by researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau and the University of Kansas.

Other groups were less sensitive to the addition of a citizenship question, such as U.S.-born Hispanic residents and noncitizens who weren’t from Latin America, the study said.

The paper comes as Republican lawmakers in Congress push to require a citizenship question on the questionnaire for the once-a-decade census. Their aim is to exclude people who aren’t citizens from the count that helps determine political power and the distribution of federal funds in the United States. The 14th Amendment requires that all people are counted in the census, not just citizens.

In May, the GOP-led House passed a bill that would eliminate noncitizens from the tally gathered during a census and used to decide how many House seats and Electoral College votes each state gets. The bill is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate. Separately, the House in coming weeks is to consider an appropriations bill containing similar language seeking to omit people in the country illegally from the count used to redraw political districts.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/noncitizens-census-race-question-rcna163604

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