Despite the outcry from liberals about adding a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, the agency for years has been asking similar questions on three other surveys and did so during the presidency of Barack Obama.
What’s more, according to a new analysis, those unwilling to cooperate with the Census due to citizenship and other questions has not increased under President Trump, though they did surge under Obama.
“I cannot find a sudden decrease in the public’s willingness to take part in Census Bureau surveys that already include a citizenship question,” said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies.
In fact, in his new report titled “Would a Citizenship Question on the 2020 Census Reduce Response Rates?” the response of Hispanic-born survey takers was charted over the candidacy election of Trump and it showed no movement.
“There has been no significant decline in the size of the foreign-born population in the monthly Current Population Survey associated with the rise of Donald Trump,” he said, referring to one of the three Census surveys regularly given and that act as a model for the Census taken every 10 years.
Liberal critics have suggested that a citizenship question, set to debut on the Census, will scare off immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, worried the information will be used to deport them.
But Camarota, basing his report on the three other regularly taken Census and labor force surveys, show that similar questions aren’t leading to a massive rejection.
The American Community Survey, which asks, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” has a refusal rate of just 2.1 percent, and it’s been on a very slow rise since 2009.
There has been concern that adding a citizenship question may reduce response rates to the 2020 Census. Results from the ACS, the Census Bureau survey most similar to the decennial Census, suggest that may not be the case.https://t.co/Z9OBZnadX5
— CIS.org (@wwwCISorg) March 26, 2018
“It is clear from the figure that refusal rates were rising long before Trump came on the scene,” wrote Camarota.
His bottom line:
Several stories in the media have discussed concerns that adding a citizenship question may reduce response rates to the 2020 Census. It is not clear why a single citizenship question on the 2020 Census would reduce response rates, since the Bureau has been asking more detailed immigration-related questions for many years on a number of its largest and most important surveys. For example, in addition to asking about citizenship, country of birth, and year of arrival, the CPS also asks each respondent for his or her mother’s and father’s birthplaces. Surveys like the CPS are the basis — and, in many cases, considered the gold-standard source — for official government estimates on everything from the nation’s unemployment and poverty rates to wages and health insurance coverage. If asking about citizenship significantly reduced data quality by lowering response rates, then a good deal of information published monthly and annually by the federal government, based on these surveys, would already be compromised.
