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 i...