Mother Jones - May 01, 2018

40 MOTHER JONES |^ MAY  JUNE 2018

HIDDEN FIGURES

In places like Fresno, there’s another giant concern: that

the census, despite confidentiality rules barring the bureau

from sharing personal information with other govern-

ment agencies, will be used by the Trump administration

to deport undocumented immigrants. In December, the

Justice Department requested that the bureau include a

question about US citizenship on the census form for the

first time since 1950. The bureau had a March 31 deadline

to decide whether to comply with that request. When this

story went to print, it had not yet announced its decision,

and it did not respond to requests for comment. But even

if the question is left off the census, it’s too late to undo the

fear it has caused in immigrant communities.

Sanjuan has been in the United States for 26 years and

has a 12-year-old son who is a US citizen. He filled out the

census for the first time in 2010, in part to ensure that his

state and local governments received their share of federal

funding for social programs. (California’s finance oice esti-

mates the state will lose $1,900 annually for each uncounted

resident in 2020.) “The benefits weren’t really for me be-

cause I never ask for anything, but there are benefits that

can help my son,” he told me at La Luna, a Mexican bakery

in a working-class Latino neighborhood near the Yosemite

Freeway, after a long afternoon canvassing Fresno’s alleys. In

the run-up to the 2010 census, he helped conduct research

on low-visibility housing in the San Joaquin Valley, an ag-

ricultural region that runs from Stockton in the north to

Bakersfield in the south, with Fresno in the middle. He met

farmworkers sleeping under trees near irrigation canals and

urged them to respond to the census so they could receive

better housing. “I’ve always said that they don’t have any-

thing to fear because if [the government] really wanted to get

rid of you, they would have done it a long time ago,” he said.

But now undocumented immigrants are “much more

fearful that they’re going to deport everyone,” he said.

“They’ve arrested people in stores, at work, on buses.” He

showed me a video posted to Facebook that day of Border

Patrol agents searching for farmworkers in a field near the

Mexican border. That week, Immigration and Customs

Enforcement raided 77 businesses in Northern California,

then the largest sweep since Trump became president. “Cal-

ifornia better hold on tight,” ice Acting Director Thomas

Homan told Fox News. “They’re about to see a lot more

special agents, a lot more deportation oicers.”

Sanjuan said it would be easier to persuade fellow immi-

grants to respond to the census if not for Trump. “I believe

it’s going to be diicult to convince people now,” he told me.

in his first state of the Union address, Trump returned

to familiar themes from his presidential campaign, decry-

ing “open borders [that] have allowed drugs and gangs to

pour into our most vulnerable communities.” Immigrants,

he said, had stolen jobs from native-born Americans and

“caused the loss of many innocent lives.” He highlighted the

stories of families who’d lost children to the MS-13 gangs,

and of the cops who’d battled them.

The next morning, 25 Latina women gathered for a

monthly support group at the Fresno Center for New

Americans, located in a strip mall next to a Family Dollar

and an El Pollo Loco restaurant. They sat at a long U-shaped

table beneath a mural of verdant farmland scenes that cel-

ebrated Fresno as “the best little city in the usa.”

Quezada was there to give a presentation on the census.

“I am an immigrant,” she said in Spanish, and she described

how her family had escaped the civil war in El Salvador

after the American-backed military regime falsely accused

her father of being a communist. “When I was little, all I

knew was war,” she said.

Quezada showed a slide of an ice agent knocking on the

door of a terrified woman. “You have the right to say nothing

and also to ask to speak with your lawyer,” Quezada said.

States expected to gain and lose congressional seats

based on a fairly conducted 2020 census

Source: Census Bureau

Percentage of the population under- and overcounted

RACE TO THE BOTTOM

The census has never been a perfect enumeration of the US

population, but it has disproportionately undercounted minority

groups, including African Americans and Hispanics (a category that

was not included as an option on the census before 1980). —Eli Day

-1

+2

-1

-1

-1

-1 -1

-1

-1

-1

+1

+1

+1

+1

+3

QPotential gain in seats

QPotential loss in seats

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

2

1

-1

-2

-3

-4

-5

-6

-7

-8

0

QWhite

QBlack

QHispanic

Source: Election Data Services