The Census Bureau is considering a change for the 2020 Census: Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin would be one of the responses offered under a single race question. This is a profoundly bad idea, as Amitai Etzioni explains in a recent opinion article in the Wall Street Journal.

The change is apparently prompted by the fact that 2 million people who claimed Hispanic status in the last two censuses changed their race classification from “some other race” in 2000 to “white” in 2010. The aim, it seems, is to maximize the number of people classified as non-white and therefore entitled to some form of racial preference. It’s understandable that Hispanics should give inconsistent responses, since the Latin American societies from which they (or their immigrant ancestors) come have different racial mixes and different radical categories than those in the United States. They do not fit easily into U.S. racial categories.