President Donald Trump’s administration is attempting a major overhaul of the U.S. Census, putting forward a proposal to exclude some noncitizens from the population count.
The proposal, announced Wednesday by the Commerce Department, would allow U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents to be counted in the census.
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However, other foreign nationals, such as those with temporary legal status and undocumented immigrants, are excluded.
Population counts serve a wide range of purposes, determining the allocation of everything from government resources to seats in the House of Representatives.
The proposal also proposes removing certain questions about race and ethnicity from surveys, citing “serious questions about the meaning, significance, and impact” of such categories and questioning their continued “usefulness.”
“For all of these reasons, the Census Bureau is reevaluating the appropriate role of these demographic questions,” the proposal reads.
They also argue that limiting the questions will encourage participation in the census, which is required every 10 years.
“Reducing the response burden is expected to improve response rates and improve the Census Bureau’s record linkage efforts. It will also allow the Census Bureau to obtain more complete population counts directly from respondents, helping to ensure fairer political representation,” the report said.
The census proposal is one of several efforts by the Trump administration that could reshape election power, along with congressional redistricting and restrictions on mail-in voting.
The proposal says undocumented immigrants and other aliens without sufficiently permanent legal status are not “true residents” and should not be included because they lack sufficient “ties and allegiance” to the United States.
This change would be a departure from historical precedent. The Census Act of 1790 directed government officials to count people who had their “ordinary residence” in the United States, regardless of citizenship status.
Wednesday’s proposal also calls for examining how people list their citizenship status on census questionnaires.
It’s already a federal crime to lie on the census. But Wednesday’s proposal proposes cross-referencing citizenship answers with other government records, including files from the Department of Homeland Security and Treasury Department, which oversees the government’s tax collection agencies.
Questions regarding legal immigration status will also be added to the short-form questionnaire.
During his first term, President Trump tried to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, but the Supreme Court blocked the effort in 2019, ruling that the administration’s rationale was “contrived.”
Critics fear such questions will be used to further President Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which he promises will be the largest in U.S. history.
It could also reduce census participation, which would distort important information about U.S. communities and jeopardize access to resources.
Census data goes beyond representation in Congress and is used in formulas that determine the distribution of federal aid. The Census Bureau reported that census data was used to allocate more than $2.8 trillion in federal funds in fiscal year 2021.
William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a public policy nonprofit, said the proposal goes beyond changing how the census is conducted.
“The administration is trying to change the concept of who is an American,” Frey told Al Jazeera.
Frey warned that even if the proposal fails, it could have a widespread chilling effect on census participation.
“That’s the scary part,” Frey said. “The administration has sought to prevent certain segments of the population from fully participating in the government. So even if these proposals do not come to fruition, it will be quite damaging.”
On September 2, the Justice Department warned that states could lose billions in welfare funding if state authorities fail to report undocumented immigrants they know are in the country.
The U.S. Census Bureau did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
