In the beforetimes, when the coronavirus was just a gleam in a pangolin’s eye, I took in the odd concert. Richmond has a wonderful venue, the National, where I’ve attended many shows. The National has a sister venue – the NorVa – and I found myself in Portsmouth-Norfolk in May 2019 for a double bill: The Last Internationale (awesome!) and Tom Morello (transcendent!). It was an evening of music to move my pale white booty along with politics to take to the street. Check both out, if you haven’t.
While in town, I sampled the region’s local paper, The Virginian-Pilot. A letter in it defended the inclusion of a citizenship question in the 2020 census. The newspaper took a pass on the letter I sent. The census remains vexing. The worst efforts to skew it – the citizenship question, President Id Personified’s call to purge the undocumented from the numbers used for reapportionment of legislative seats – were thwarted; nevertheless, the pandemic likely ensured a flawed count that will serve right-wing interests.
Maurice F. Conner, “Citizenship Status Is Needed,” The Virginian-Pilot, 16 May 2019, 12 (www.pilotonline.com/opinion/letters/article_6b097382-772e-11e9-bb92-cbbec9217c7c.html).
Maurice Connor (The Virginian-Pilot, 16 May 2019, 12) rightly calls for Congress to address immigration reform and decries President Trump’s divisive rhetoric but he misreads the reasons why the citizenship question will potentially reappear in the 2020 Census after having been deemed unnecessary and counterproductive more than a half century ago.
There is no legal requirement that the census ask about citizenship. The Constitution mandates that the census count people, not citizens, because the nation has always been home to multitudes of non-citizens, documented and undocumented. The Census Bureau estimates that the question will reduce participation by non-citizens by 5.1 percent and cause an undercount of 6.5 million.[1]
Far more troubling is the probability that the resurrection of the citizenship question was politically motivated. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who initially asserted that the question arose from a Justice Department request, conceded last October that he had discussed the matter with then Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who encouraged Ross to contact Kris Kobach, [2] the Kansas secretary of state infamous for efforts to disqualify voters and for leadership of Trump’s farcical voter fraud commission. Beyond any dishonesty by Ross in congressional testimony, the question’s origin smacks at best of an attempt at demographic gerrymandering and at worst of the pursuit of alt-right, anti-immigrant policies through the vehicle of the census.
The Supreme Court should not permit Trump and his minions to corrupt yet another institution by politically weaponizing it.
[1] Dana Milbank, “Saving White Hegemony in Four Little Steps,” The Washington Post, 24 April 2019, A21 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-census-case-presents-how-to-preserve-white-hegemony-in-four-easy-steps/2019/04/23/ef2b6712-660b-11e9-82ba-fcfeff232e8f_story.html).
[2] Glenn Thrush and Adam Liptack, “Wilbur Ross Changes Story on Discussion of Citizenship Question in Census,” The New York Times, 12 October 2018 (www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/us/politics/wilbur-ross-commerce-census-citizenship.html).