The Commerce Department has announced that it will add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census. Heather Trela and Jeffrey M. Wice of the Rockefeller Institute of Government note that many federal programs rely on census data to distribute funds. They suggest that adding a question about citizenship could lead to an inaccurate count of the number of residents in the United States. The effects of such an undercount, they contend, could be “significant and long-standing.” The editors of the National Review, however, suggest that there is no evidence that asking about citizenship will have a negative effect on either the response rate by noncitizens or the reliability of the resulting data. Read more here and here.
