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Return of Citizenship Question on Census Blasted

VoteCalifornia is suing to stop the Census Bureau from reinstating a citizenship question on the census that hasn’t been asked since 1950.

Opponents fear it is an attempt by the Trump administration to make immigrants fearful of answering the census, thus leading to an undercount of minorities.

The lawsuit was filed late last night just hours after the U.S. Census Bureau announced its decision which was made at the request of the Justice Department.

The Census can impact the make up of Congress and determine how government funds are used.

According to USA Today, the decision was an attempt to enforce the Voting Rights Act.
 
“Coupled with their relentless and heartless immigration enforcement, they should be fully aware that their decision could have a massive chilling effect on participation in the Census,” said Gregg Orton, national director of the National Council on Asian Pacific Americans. “How do you make America great again if you don’t know who America is? But perhaps a simpler question is whether this Administration even cares.”
 
“The Census Bureau itself has recognized that communities are fearful of government surveys in this current environment,” said John C. Yang, Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC . “For them to claim that adding this question will somehow give them better or more accurate data flies in the face of their own procedures.”
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Civil right groups around the country joined in the denunciation of the census question.
 
“Make no mistake – this decision is motivated purely by politics,” said former Attorney General Eric Holder. “In deciding to add this question without even testing its effects, the Administration is departing from decades of census policy and ignoring the warnings of census experts.”

“This is a clear attempt to politicize the process by discouraging minority communities and immigrant communities from participating in the count,” Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in a statement to the Huff Post. “This decision comes at a time when we have seen xenophobic and anti-immigrant policy positions from this administration. This is an arbitrary and untested decision that all but guarantees that the Census will not produce a full and accurate count of the population as the constitution requires.”

The conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation applauded the decision.

“Only citizens should be given political power. Our current system leads to noncitizens being allocated political power in legislatures at the expense of citizens,” said the Foundation’s president, J. Christian Adams.
 


 

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