Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT) have proposed an amendment (S.AMDT 2644) to the FY10 Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill (H.R. 2847), which includes funds for the Census Bureau. The amendment bars the Census Bureau from spending funds on the 2010 Census unless it collects information on each person regarding citizenship and immigration status.
This is really fragged, people. This is so unbelievably full of the stupid. This is a thinly-veiled attempt to shift representation away from urban areas, a long-time effort on the part of the right-wing.
Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT) have proposed an amendment (S.AMDT 2644) to the FY10 Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill (H.R. 2847), which includes funds for the Census Bureau. The amendment bars the Census Bureau from spending funds on the 2010 Census unless it collects information on each person regarding citizenship and immigration status.
The statements of the amendment sponsors indicate that the primary purpose of the legislation is to exclude undocumented residents from being counted for purposes of congressional apportionment.
This is b*lls**t. To many people the Census seems like a nerdy exercise in bean counting, but our very democracy depends upon this being done correctly every ten years, as required by Title 13 of the US Code. The code calls for the counting of all persons RESIDING in the United States, not all "citizens."
Asking questions about immigration status will depress participation in the 2010 Census among immigrants and Latinos, both authorized and unauthorized--and thus they will be undercounted. In 2000, the then-Immigration and Naturalization Service suspended raids before and after the census so as not to deter undocumented residents from responding. There hasn't been a similar promise for the 2010 Census.
Guess what kinds of places will be undercounted and thus lose representation and federal dollars? Where do immigrants tend to live? - urban centers. Urban centers contain many of the hardest-to-count populations - minorities, immigrants, the homeless, boarding houses - all of those living arrangements that you don't find in homogeneous suburban settings.
Inaccurate results will mean that a half trillion dollars in federal funds will be disproportionately distributed to places without immigrants, affecting the siting of schools, highways, health facilities, and emergency response and recovery.
What these unschooled jerks also don't understand is that it is, for all intents and purposes, too late to add a question to the Census 2010 form. THEY ARE ALREADY BEING PRINTED. Census questions generally have to be submitted to congress two years ahead of a Census and have to be field tested. What a waste of money.
Former Census Directors (both Democrat and Republican) released this letter today:
As former directors of the U.S. Census Bureau, serving under both
Republican and Democratic Administrations, we are greatly troubled by the
proposal (an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2010 Commerce, Justice, and Science
Appropriations bill) to add a new question on citizenship and immigration status to
the 2010 census. We can say unequivocally that adding an untested question at
this late point in the decennial process would put the accuracy of the enumeration
in all communities at risk and would likely delay the start of the census and all
subsequent activities, such as reapportionment of the House of Representatives and
reporting of detailed population figures under Public Law 94-171.
The wingnuts did something similar in January 1999 when they stopped the Census Bureau from using statistical sampling for the Census count of the entire population. Such a sampling technique would have allowed the Bureau to much more accurately adjust population estimates for the historically undercounted, would have more accurately captured the population of urban centers, and would have been much less expensive.
I know this isn't as sexy as health care or as "rant-able" as the Nobel Prize. But please, call your Senators tomorrow and tell them to block S.AMDT 2644, amending H.R. 2847 (Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill).