16 THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020
been breached. In 1942, the Senate Ju-
diciary Committee added Amendment
S.2208 to a new War Powers Act. It au-
thorized the Census Bureau to release
individual-level information from the
1940 U.S. census to government agen-
cies. That information was to be used
chiefly by the Department of Justice, in
implementing an executive order, signed
by F.D.R., that mandated the “evacu-
ation” of people living in the United
States who were of Japanese descent,
and their imprisonment in internment
camps. The 1940 census, the New York
Times reported, “now a secret under law,
government officers believe, would be
of material aid in mopping up those
who had eluded the general evacua-
tion orders.”
The law didn’t have to change. In-
stead, government officials simply vio-
lated it. William Lane Austin, a long-
time head of the Census Bureau, had
steadfastly resisted efforts to betray the
confidentiality of individual-level rec-
ords. But Lane retired in 1941, and his
successor, James Clyde Capt, willingly
complied.
There were no people born in Japan,
or whose parents were born in Japan,
living on Fourth Avenue in North Ber-
gen, New Jersey, on April 1, 1940. Still,
Otto Schultz, a German-born non-cit-
izen, had plenty to worry about, as did
other German aliens, and Italians, too.
In 1942, the War Department consid-
ered proposals for the mass relocation
of Italian and German aliens on the
East Coast. In the end, F.D.R. dismissed
Italians as “a lot of opera singers,” and
determined that the relocation of Ger-
mans and Italians—the two largest for-
eign-born populations in the United
States—was simply impractical. (Even
so, thousands of people of German and
Italian ancestry were interned during
the war.)
Ten years later, in the aftermath of
Japanese incarceration, the Census Bu-
reau and the National Archives together
adopted the seventy-two-year rule, clos-
ing individual-level census records for
the length of a lifetime, after which the
National Archives “may disclose infor-
mation contained in these records for
use in legitimate historical, genealogical
or other worth-while research, provided
adequate precautions are taken to make
sure that the information disclosed is
not to be used to the detriment of any
of the persons whose records are in-
volved.” Those precautions became moot
when making the records available meant
making them available online.W
hen Wilbur Ross directed the
Census Bureau to add a citizen-
ship question to the 2020 census, he
said that he had made this decision in
response to a request from the Justice
Department. He was lying.
The Census Bureau does not like to
add new questions. For every new ques-
tion, the response rate falls. If the bu-
reau’s researchers do want to add a ques-
tion, they try it out first, conducting a
study that ordinarily takes about five
years. (Among the bigger changes, in
recent decades: since 1960, Americans
have been able to self-report their race;
since 1980, they have been asked whether
they are “Spanish/Hispanic”; since 2000,
they have been able to list more than
one race.) In March, 2017, when Ross
submitted a report to Congress listing
the questions his department wanted
on the 2020 census, he did not include
a citizenship question. A year later, he
sent a memo to the Census Bureau di-
recting it to add that question, citing a
December 12, 2017, letter from the Jus-
tice Department requesting the ques-
tion for the purpose of enforcing the
Voting Rights Act. The Census Bureau
proposed alternative means by which
whatever information the D.O.J. needed
could be obtained, from existing data,
and warned that adding the question
to the census would reduce the response
rate, especially from historically under-
counted populations, which include re-
cent immigrants. Ross rejected those
alternatives.
Congress pressed him. Had “the pres-
ident or anyone in the White House
discussed with you or anyone on your
team adding a citizenship question?”
Representative Grace Meng asked, in a
hearing before the House Appropria-
tions Committee. “I am not aware of
such,” Ross answered. But, as Judge Fur-
man documented in his opinion, dis-
covery during the trial produced evi-
dence that, long before the D.O.J. request,
Ross had been discussing a citizenship
question with Trump advisers, includ-
ing Steve Bannon, who had asked “if he
would be willing to speak to Kansas Sec-retary of State Kris Kobach’s ideas about
a possible citizenship question.”
In June, 2019, the Supreme Court,
upon reading Furman’s opinion, affirmed
his decision. Writing the majority, Chief
Justice Roberts concluded that the
Trump Administration’s explanation for
why it wanted to add the question “ap-
pears to have been contrived.”M
ore than a hundred and fifty coun-
tries will undertake a census in- After the first U.S. census, in 1790,
fifty-four nations, including Argentina,
in 1853, and Canada, in 1867, adopted re-
quirements for a decennial census in their
constitutions. Attempts to reliably esti-
mate the population of the whole world
began in earnest in 1911, with a count of
the population of the British Empire. By
1964, censuses regularly counted nine-
ty-five per cent of the world’s popula-
tion, producing tallies that led both to
panics about overpopulation and to the
funding of population-control organi-
zations. The United Nations Population
Division predicts a total world popula-
tion of 7.8 billion by 2020.
Under current laws, your answers to
the 2020 census cannot be seen by any-
one outside the Census Bureau until
April 2, 2092. But by then there is un-
likely to be anything like a traditional
census left. In 2020, the single largest
counter of people is Facebook, which has
2.4 billion users, a population bigger than
that of any nation. The 2020 census will
cost the United States sixteen billion
dollars. Census-taking is so expensive,
and so antiquated, that the United King-
dom tried to cancel its 2021 census.
In the ancient world, rulers counted
and collected information about people
in order to make use of them, to extract
their labor or their property. Facebook
works the same way. “It was the great
achievement of eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century census-takers to break
that nexus and persuade people—the
public on one side and their colleagues
in government on the other—that states
could collect data on their citizens with-
out using it against them,” Whitby
writes. It is among the tragedies of the
past century that this trust has been be-
trayed. But it will be the error of the
next if people agree to be counted by
unregulated corporations, rather than
by democratic governments.