The usual suspects on the left are melting down because the U.S. Department of Commerce has reinstated the citizenship question to the 2020 census. You know the drill, this move is racist, xenophobic, tyrannical, and even, according to California’s attorney general, illegal.
The left is frantic because they are worried that illegal aliens will not fill out the 2020 census and as a result Democrat-held urban areas—where large numbers of illegals are concentrated—will lose out to more rural areas. Rural areas tend to be more conservative and to vote Republican.
California’s attorney general has announced he is filing suit over the reinstated question of citizenship.
Former Attorney General and presidential hopeful intent on “unifying the country” Eric Holder says that the question is intended to intimidate people (illegal aliens, presumably).
FiveThirtyEight has weighed in, too, stating that “new math could shift political representation towards eligible voters and away from the country’s overall population.” Apparently, political representation of eligible voters is a lunatic idea.
The problem for the left, of course, is that reinstating the citizenship question will do just that.
The Trump administration is being sued over its plans to include a question about citizenship in the 2020 Census, which California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) says “is not just a bad idea — it is illegal.”
No, it’s not. There is nothing wrong with asking about citizenship. Canada asks a citizenship question on its census. So do Australia and many other U.S. allies. The U.S. government asked about citizenship for 130 years — from 1820 to 1950 — as part of the decennial “short form” census and continued to do so in the “long form” survey — distributed to 1 in 6 people — through 2000, when the long form was replaced by the annual American Community Survey. The ACS goes to about 2.6 percent of the population each year and asks about citizenship to this day.So why are many on the left up in arms over a question that should be relatively uncontroversial? Answer: Money and power. Democrats are worried that adding a citizenship question will dampen participation in the census by illegal immigrants, reducing the total population count in the Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas where illegal immigrants are largely concentrated.Because census data is used to determine the distribution of federal funds, that could decrease the cities’ share of more than $675 billion a year in federal funding. And because census data is also used to create and apportion congressional seats, Democrats fear that if illegal immigrants don’t participate it could shift power from Democratic cities to rural communities, which tend to vote Republican.. . . . This is a losing issue for Democrats. They are effectively arguing that sanctuary cities should be rewarded with more federal money for interfering with the federal enforcement of our immigration laws and turning themselves into magnets for illegal immigrants.And Democrats, who claim to be deeply concerned about foreign interference in our democracy, seem to have no problem with foreign interference when it comes to noncitizens in the United States illegally affecting the distribution of seats in Congress. If Democrats want to make that argument to the American people, go for it. It will further alienate millions of voters who abandoned the Democratic Party in the 2016 election.
The left ignores how failure to ask about citizenship hurts another of their key demographics: black people.
Let’s borrow the absurd rhetoric of the crazed Left for a moment: the status quo — not asking for citizenship data in the Census — is Jim Crow. Jim Crow hurts black political power, and so does a lack of solid citizenship data in the decennial census.Here’s how.
In many urban areas, blacks compete with Hispanics for local office, particularly in Democratic Party primaries. Miami, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, and Chicago are places where local Democratic Party politics have deep African-American and Hispanic constituencies. In November, they are rock-solid Democrat voters to defeat Republicans. But in primaries, they often compete.
More importantly, the two groups also compete in line-drawing exercises, where districts are created for school board, county council, statehouse, and Congress. Racial line-drawing — an exercise compelled by the Voting Rights Act whether you like it or not — is reality. Racial line-drawing relies on census data, and each district must have essentially equal population under existing law.
This line drawing counts non-citizen Hispanics to generate Hispanic-majority districts with the minimum total population (citizen and non-citizen combined). But blacks have to ride in the back of the redistricting bus, because they are almost all citizens.
That’s where Trump’s Census change could revolutionize the dynamics of line-drawing in urban communities where blacks and Hispanics have concentrated populations.
This conundrum highlights a very real problem for Democrats. They are so invested in identity politics that it’s inevitable that policies advocating one of their favored groups will harm another (often many others). They just hope that no one notices.
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