Why the Census Citizenship Question is Useless

The short answer is that there is no penalty for NOT answering the question. Let's imagine a possible scenario. You have 100 homes each containing a average of 10 people for a total of 1,000 Census questionnaires. The population as far as the Census is concerned, is diverse. As an example, with full compliance, it would consist of 450 citizens and 550 non-citizens. Amongst the latter, there might be 100 Green Card holders, 50 visitors and 400 undocumented residents.

In a world in which there are stiff penalties for not answering the Census and we get close to 100% compliance, the president would obtain his numbers to do his schemes. However, are the 400 undocumented residents going to respond? I think you will agree, it's unlikely. Yet we still run the Census periodically as dictated by our Constitution. Now, the solution to all the underreporting is to try to employ statistics.

Here is how it could work (I don't work for the Bureau, so I can't be certain but this is reasonable): The Census takers report 420 (63%) questionnaires answered or returned by citizens, 90 (14%) returned by the Green Card holders, 25 (4%) returned by tourists or visitors staying with friends or relatives, and 100 (15%) undocumented (because they were told it was anonymous). That's a total of 665 respondents but the Bureau knows that the number should be closer to 1,000.

Statistics to the quasi-rescue. The Census Bureau now parses the alleged 335 (1,000-665)  into citizens and the various non-citizen groups. The 335 non-respondents get parsed into 211 citizens, 47 Green Card holders, 13 tourists/visitors, and 50 undocumented. These statistics are crude and no doubt the experts at the Census Bureau could come up with more accurate numbers but it would always be subject to dispute.

An important issue is that the non-respondents ought not to be considered non-citizens for as we noted above, they could be Green Card holders, visitors, and even citizens who decided for one reason or another not to fill out the questionnaire.

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