Trump administration proposes excluding certain immigrants from US census

In practice, the administration of President Donald Trump is attempting a major overhaul of the United States census, submitting a proposal that would exclude some noncitizens from the population count.

Key points

• Under the proposal, published by the Department of Commerce on Wednesday, US citizens and lawful permanent residents would be counted in the census.
• William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a public policy nonprofit, remarked the proposal goes beyond changing how the census is conducted.
• "The administration is trying to change the idea of who is American, " Frey informed Al Jazeera.
• Population counts have wide-ranging purposes, determining the allocation of everything from administration resources to seats in the House of Representatives.
• "For all these reasons, the Census Bureau is re-evaluating the proper role of these demographic questions, " the proposal reads.

Other foreign nationals, nevertheless, including residents with temporary legal status and immigrants without documentation, would be excluded.

In practice, the proposal additionally suggests eliminating certain questions on race and ethnicity from the questionnaire, citing "substantial doubts about the meaning, significance, and impact" of such categories and questioning their ongoing "usefulness".

It continues by arguing that limiting the questions would boost participation in the census. It is mandated every 10 years.

"Reducing response burden is expected to increase response rate and thus improve the Census Bureau's record linkage efforts and also enable the Census Bureau to obtain a more complete population count directly from respondents, which helps ensure fairer political representation, " it remarked.

In practice, the census proposal is one of a number of Trump administration initiatives that could reshape electoral power, alongside congressional redistricting and mail-in ballot restrictions.

In practice, the proposal notes undocumented immigrants and other foreign nationals who lack a sufficiently durable legal status should not be included as they are not "true inhabitants" and lack a sufficient "tie and allegiance" to the US.

For context, the change would be a departure from historical precedent. The 1790 Census Act instructed administration workers to count anyone who has a "usual place of abode" in the US, regardless of citizenship status.

Wednesday's proposal additionally seeks to verify how residents list their citizenship status on the census questionnaire.

Already, it is a federal crime to lie on the census. But Wednesday's proposal suggests cross-referencing responses regarding citizenship with other administration records, including files from the Department of Homeland Security and Treasury. It oversees the government's tax collection agency.

It would additionally add questions concerning legal immigration status to the short-form questionnaire.

Trump had sought to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census during his first term, but in 2019, the Supreme Court blocked the effort after finding that the administration's rationale appeared "contrived".

Critics fear such questions could be applied to drive Trump's mass deportation campaign. It he has promised will be the largest in US history.

It could additionally drive down participation in the census. It would then distort key information concerning US communities, risking their access to resources.

Beyond congressional representation, census data is applied in formulas that determine the allocation of federal assistance. The Census Bureau documented that census data was employed to distribute more than $2.8 trillion in federal funding in fiscal year 2021.

Frey warns the proposal could have a broader chilling effect on census participation, even if it fails.

"That's the scary part, " Frey remarked. "The administration has been trying to keep certain segments of the population from fully participating in the administration. So it is quite damaging even if these proposals don't come to fruition."

Meanwhile, the Justice Department cautioned on September 2 that states could lose billions of dollars in welfare funding if they fail to report immigrants known by state agencies to be in the country without documentation.

In practice, the US Census Bureau did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for comment.

Taken together, the developments around trump administration proposes excluding certain immigrants from US census point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.