MAY JUNE 2018 | MOTHER JONES 43thing like that happened to me as a director, I would feel
intimidated by it,” says Prewitt. In March, the bureau chose
as its head of congressional affairs a top aide to former Sen.
David Vitter (R-La.), who repeatedly introduced legislation
to add a question about US citizenship to the census form.
In December, when the Justice Department took up that
call and requested the citizenship question, it said it needed
the information to enforce the Voting Rights Act. Gupta,
the former head of the department’s Civil Rights Division,
says that’s “plainly a ruse to collect that data and ultimately
to sabotage the census.” Five former directors of the bureau
who served under Republican and Democratic presidents
wrote a letter opposing the citizenship question.
“It would be a horrendous problem for the Census Bureau
and create all kind of controversies,” says Steve Murdock,
who led the census from 2008 to 2009 under President
George W. Bush. When I asked immigrants in the Fresno
area whether they would respond to the census if it included
a question about citizenship, virtually all of them said no.
Prominent anti-immigration hardliners, including
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the former vice
chair of Trump’s election integrity commission, are hoping
to use citizenship data from the census to further reduce
immigrants’ political influence. They have issued a radical
proposal to draw legislative maps based on the number of
citizens in a district rather than the total population, which
would significantly diminish political representation for
areas with large numbers of noncitizens.
Even before the Justice Department proposed the citi-
zenship question, field surveys and focus groups conducted
by the bureau in five states in 2017 found that “fears, par-
ticularly among immigrant respondents, have increased
markedly.” Interviewees “intentionally provided incomplete
or incorrect information about household members due to
concerns regarding confidentiality, particularly relating to
perceived negative attitudes toward immigrants,” accord-
ing to a memo from the Center for Survey Measurement,
a division of the bureau. One Spanish-speaking field repre-
sentative told the bureau that a family moved away from a
trailer park to avoid being interviewed: “There was a clus-
ter of mobile homes, all Hispanic. I went to one and I left
the information on the door. I could hear them inside. I
did two more interviews, and when I came back they were
moving...It’s because they were afraid of being deported.”
Such fear has precedent. During World War II, the
Census Bureau gave the names and addresses of Japanese
Americans to the Secret Service, which used the informa-
tion to round up people and send them to internment
camps. That abuse led to strict confidentiality standards
for the bureau. But many immigrants will never trust the
Trump administration with their personal information.
“Immigrants and their families all feel under attack, under
siege, by the federal government,” says Arturo Vargas,
executive director of the National Association of Latino
Elected and Appointed Oicials Educational Fund, who
serves on a Census Bureau advisory committee. “And then
we have to turn around and tell these same people, ‘Trust
the federal government when they come to count you.’”
The Commerce Department now estimates that only
55 percent of Americans will initially fill out the census in
2020 after receiving a postcard in the mail, down from 63
percent who sent back the first form in 2010. The need to
reach out to the remainder of the population will drive up
expenses and could result in further cutbacks. Commerce
Secretary Wilbur Ross, who worked as an enumerator
while attending Harvard Business School, told Congress
in October that the census would cost $3 billion more
than initially projected.
Already, the bureau’s outreach is lagging. For the 2010
census, it ran a $340 million promotional ad campaign fea-
turing Winter Olympians, nascar drivers, and Dora the
Explorer. “Everyone counts on the census form!” Dora said
in one ad. The popular Telemundo telenovela Más Sabe el
Diablo (“The Devil Knows Best”) even featured a storyline
where the character Perla got a job working for the Census
Bureau in New York City.
So far, the bureau has only 40 employees working with
local governments and community groups on outreach,
far short of the 120 at this point 10 years ago. The bureau is
focusing its limited budget on perfecting the new technol-
ogy it will use in 2020, shortchanging the advertising and
local partnerships it typically uses toLatino tenants at a low-
income housing complex in
Huron, California, discuss
the census at a community
meeting in February.(continued on page 67)