Trump directive on state counts said to threaten rigor of census

doi:10.1126/science.369.6504.611

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DOI	10.1126/science.369.6504.611
	Trump directive on state counts said to threaten rigor of census
	Jeffrey Mervis
	2020-08-07
发表期刊	Science
出版年	2020
英文摘要	President Donald Trump wants the U.S. Census Bureau to help him wage war against what he calls “illegal” immigration. But census advocates and demography experts are worried that the nation's largest statistical agency would have to compromise its high standards if it is compelled to join the fight. On 21 July, Trump told the Census Bureau to exclude undocumented residents from its tally of each state's population. Those numbers, which are gleaned from the overall 2020 census now underway, are used to decide how many seats each state gets in the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives. Democrats in Congress and civil rights groups have decried Trump's directive, saying it violates the U.S. Constitution's requirement to count every resident, and several groups have sued to block it. But Republicans generally back the president's argument that only citizens should count in apportionment. In the meantime, the statistics community is warning it may be technically impossible for the agency to satisfy Trump's request, which would require using information already in government files to try to identify undocumented residents. In June 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the administration's controversial attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, which began on 1 April. Two weeks later, Trump sought an end run by ordering the bureau to use Social Security records, immigration documents, driver's license data, and other information already on file to calculate how many residents are U.S. citizens. His new memo goes further, telling census officials to divide the population into three groups: citizens, documented immigrants, and undocumented residents. “I don't know what set of data sources the bureau could identify for that purpose,” says economist Amy O'Hara of Georgetown University, who until 2017 oversaw Census Bureau efforts to use such “administrative records” to improve the quality of its many surveys. “And for the ones they have, it's not clear how they would operationalize them.” Census officials have tried to remain upbeat. The Census Bureau's chief scientist, John Abowd, “has said he can count the number of citizens,” notes Rob Santos, incoming president of the American Statistical Association and chief methodologist at the Urban Institute. “But he's never said that he can count the number of undocumented residents. And he'd be crazy to promise that.” Among the problems, experts say, is that available information on a person's citizenship status is often not up to date, or is not linked to a specific address, a key census data point. Obeying the president's memo could put the agency's core principles to the test, says former Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt. “The bureau will struggle with the enormous burden of whether to release substandard results [from the census],” he testified last week before a congressional panel reviewing Trump's memo. “The bureau will not want to inflict that damage. It is too honorable, too scientific, too proud of its professional standards, too faithful to its constitutional duties.” In every census, the agency conducts a massive follow-up effort to reach those who don't reply to multiple requests to fill out the survey. That door-knocking campaign costs billions of dollars and requires an army of enumerators. But Prewitt and other former directors believe the new directive boosts the chances of an unprecedentedly large undercount in the 2020 census. “I am very concerned that [Trump's directive] will increase the fear of many in the hard-to-count community that their data … will be given over to immigration enforcement,” John Thompson, who stepped down as census director shortly after Trump took office, told the congressional panel. “The end result will most likely be increased undercounts of these populations.” The pandemic, meanwhile, forced the agency to suspend most door-to-door visits in mid-March. In a coronavirus relief bill that the Democrat-led House approved in May, it gave the census an additional 4 months to prepare the state population totals, which are due 31 December. In keeping with that revised schedule, census officials last month said they would resume full field operations by 11 August and finish by the end of October. But the extension was absent from the Republican-led Senate's version of the bill released last week. Media have reported that the White House now wants the state tallies by the original deadline. To meet that goal, the Census Bureau now plans to conclude field operations by the end of September. But that compressed schedule leaves census officials with little time to figure out how to generate the numbers that Trump wants. At the hearing, the current census director, Steven Dillingham, declined to wade into the partisan debate over Trump's directive. “I am not in a position in which I can express my opinions with regard to the policy, the history, and certainly not the legal analysis [behind the directive],” he told Representative Carolyn Maloney (D–NY), who chairs the House oversight panel that held the hearing. “My job is to execute the 2020 census, and our goal is a complete and accurate count.” But when Representative James Comer (R–KY) asked whether Dillingham was “confident we can get an accurate count of legal citizens, for purposes of apportionment,” Dillingham dodged the question. “I am confident that we will analyze the data we have,” Dillingham replied, “and look at methodologies that might be employed for that purpose.”
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条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/287959
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推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Jeffrey Mervis. Trump directive on state counts said to threaten rigor of census[J]. Science,2020.
APA	Jeffrey Mervis.(2020).Trump directive on state counts said to threaten rigor of census.Science.
MLA	Jeffrey Mervis."Trump directive on state counts said to threaten rigor of census".Science (2020).