Trump is Reshaping the Census to Reflect His Vision of America – Mother Jones

Source: https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/trump-is-reshaping-the-census-to-reflect-his-vision-of-america/ (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/trump-is-reshaping-the-census-to-reflect-his-vision-of-america/)

Quotes:

While we have multiplied, reshuffled, and sliced our racial categories, they have never been comprehensive or comprehensible to anyone but Americans. Like the Trump presidency itself, the census’s foundations are racial.

Yet the census is our best source of information about the nation, and the only way to draw fair legislative boundaries. And today it is in danger.

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More practically, the move deprives the bureau of the 3,500 specialized employees that the 2010 Census used because they could speak multiple languages to find non-English speakers (who tend to live in Democratic districts).

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After September 11, 2001, people were astonished to learn that the federal government didn’t know how many Middle Easterners lived in America. There was a simple explanation: We hadn’t gone to war there recently. A group listed on the census is a group we’ve invaded or colonized. The census has check boxes for nine different subcategories of Asians, nearly every one representing a different war or territory: Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Chinese, Hawaiian, Guamanian, Chamorro or Samoan. After 15 years of war in the Middle East, President Barack Obama and immigrant advocacy groups had proposed adding a “MENA” category for Middle East and North Africa for the 2020 census. (The census is prohibited from collecting religious information, so Muslims cannot be enumerated.) Counterintuitively, Trump, thanks to his budget cuts, has squashed the chance to count Middle Easterners in the 2020 Census.

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The real problem with Trump’s push to add citizenship questions, underfund the census, and produce an undercount is that it corrals the Census into producing the vision of America Trump already imagines.

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The administration claims it wants an accurate count. But while Trump fantasizes that there are millions of noncitizen voters out there, who really gets counted twice and wins more representation? People with two homes.