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It's another day ending in "-day," so of course folks are spreading bad history to protect the #2020Census citizenship question. Claims that these questions have a deep history, etc. are misleading, where they’re not outright FALSE. Why? Stroll with me for a minute or two 👇
First, the receipts
We’ve comprehensively and exhaustively dismantled the mythical history of citizenship questions in The Georgetown Law Journal (@GeorgetownLJ): georgetownlawjournal.org/articles/311/c…
The TL;DR in @latimes / @latimesopinion: The Trump Administration's citizenship question has no historical precedent: : latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/…
Now, onto the main show:
(1) The Trump Administration wants to ask for the citizenship status of everyone in the country. The census has never asked for the citizenship status of everyone in the country. Something unprecedented like the Trump Admin's citizenship question is, in fact, “new.”
(2) No doubt, the census asked about citizenship or naturalization status on some censuses between 1820 and 1950. But it NEVER asked for EVERYONE’S citizenship data.
Not.
Even.
Once.
Again, what the Trump Admin wants to do is NOT normal, historically speaking.
Not.
Even.
Once.
Again, what the Trump Admin wants to do is NOT normal, historically speaking.
(3) Now, these early censuses that included citizenship or naturalization questions for subsets of the population did NOT have a good track record.
The Census Bureau realized after the 1950 Census that trying to count heads AND collect large amounts of other info—the two things that the Bureau had long tried to do with the decennial census—had massive problems.
(Rare archival footage, circa 1951)
This approach to the census was costly, error-laden, etc. So, after 1950, the Bureau dramatically switched up its practice. The main thing the Bureau did: Separate counting heads from most of the other data gathering.
The Bureau created a short form to count heads and sample surveys to collect everything else.
This allowed it to protect the head count from problems created by trying to gather other data. For most questions, it was easier and/or safer to just ask a sample of the population and extrapolate from there.
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