Update: Since this was posted, trump has admitted defeat in getting the citizenship question added to the census questionnaire. However, much of the information in this diary remains relevant about what the government could do with census data, especially by combining census data with other records, even without the citizenship question.
BTW, I am not reassured by the following:
Instead, Trump said he is ordering every federal agency to give the Commerce Department records on numbers of citizens and noncitizens, including databases from the Homeland Security Department and the Social Security Administration.
Are Congressional Republicans OK with this? Isn’t this kind of “government overreach”?
And as mentioned below, even before today’s reversal:
To fill in the blanks on 2020 census forms, the bureau is planning to use, for the first time, personal information from federal and state records, such as tax returns and Medicaid applications, as well as public utility records.
I thought that individual tax returns were as confidential as individual census data! But even if tax returns aren’t shared with other departments, they could still play a vital role in identifying unauthorized immigrants when combined with data from the Social Security Administration (SSA). Here’s how:
Employees working in the U.S. must provide a social security number (SSN) or taxpayer ID number (TIN) for tax withholding and reporting purposes. These numbers are assigned using a hashing algorithm that restricts valid values to a discrete set, so the government can tell whether an ID is a valid number. People who don’t have the documentation to get their own SSN or TIN obtain, often by purchasing, the SSN of a deceased taxpayer to give to their employers so they can get paid. All workers have FICA (Social Security and Medicare taxes) withheld from their paychecks along with federal and state income tax. However, workers using someone else’s SSN don’t want to risk filing tax returns.
So if the SSA gives Commerce access to their entire database, Commerce could pass the data to Treasury, who could then compare the data from the SSA with individual tax returns and flag those individuals who had FICA reported to the SSA but who didn’t file returns with the IRS. Not all of them would necessarily be unauthorized immigrants, but doing this would provide ICE with a target list. IRS would do the comparison themselves so they technically wouldn’t be sharing individual returns with other agencies.
Even without the citizenship question, unauthorized immigrants are not safe from their census data being used to identify and potentially deport them.
Leaving census questions blank is discussed below.
Original diary:
Make no mistake — if the citizenship question is added to the census, it could be used to target individuals for deportation. Despite laws that prohibit the Census Bureau from sharing information about individual households with anyone including other government agencies, confidential census data was used specifically to assist the Secret Service with identifying Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals for incarceration during WWII, when the confidentiality protections were temporarily suspended by the Second War Powers Act of 1942.
The bureau initially claimed it provided only block-level data to agencies targeting Japanese Americans. However, in 2007, researchers discovered otherwise:
A new study of U.S. Department of Commerce documents now shows that the Census Bureau complied with an August 4, 1943, request by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau for the names and locations of all people of Japanese ancestry in the Washington, D.C., area, according to historian Margo Anderson of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and statistician William Seltzer of Fordham University in New York City. The records, however, do not indicate that the Bureau was asked for or divulged such information for Japanese-Americans in other parts of the country.
[…] The Census Bureau had no records of such action, so the researchers turned to the records of the chief clerk of the Commerce Department, which received and had the authority to authorize interagency requests for census data under the Second War Powers Act. Anderson and Seltzer discovered copies of a memo from the secretary of the treasury (of which the Secret Service is part) to the secretary of commerce (who oversees the Census Bureau) requesting the data, and memos documenting that the Bureau had provided it [see image below].
[…] The newly revealed documents show that census officials released the information just seven days after it was requested. Given the red tape for which bureaucracies are famous, "it leads us to believe this was a well-established path," Seltzer says, meaning such disclosure may have occurred repeatedly between March 1942, when legal protection of confidentiality was suspended, and the August 1943 request.
The article notes that the confidentiality of census data was restored in 1947 and became part of Title 13 of the U.S. Code in 1954. (More about this here.) But during the war, census data on people who listed their race as Japanese was furnished to the Secret Service to facilitate their incarceration. Could something similar happen with ICE?
IANAL, and I hope our community’s legal eagles will weigh in on this, but I worry that trump will use his national “emergency” declaration to bypass Congress and suspend the confidentiality rules all by himself, so he can use census data to deport unauthorized immigrants. We have a “president” who thinks he is the law. He has installed sycophants who are loyal not to the Constitution or the rule of law but to him personally throughout the Executive Branch. The Census Bureau is part of the Dept. of Commerce, whose head, Wilbur Ross, is spearheading the attempt to include the citizenship question on the census. If he has the data, would he hesitate to turn it over to ICE, using the national “emergency” as pretext?
To see how this could happen, let’s look at the questions that are already approved for inclusion on the census form. The 2010 census included these questions for each resident of each household:
- What is Person 1's age and what is Person 1's date of birth?
Please report babies as age 0 when the childe is less than 1 year old. Print numbers in boxes.
Age on April 1, 2010 Month Day Year of birth
NOTE: Please answer BOTH Question 8 about Hispanic origin and Question 9 about race. For this census, Hispanis origins are not races.
- Is Person 1 of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin?
- No, not of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin
- Yes, Mexican, Mexican Am., Chicano
- Yes, Puerto Rican
- Yes, Cuban
- Yes, another Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin — Print origin, for example,Argentinean, Colombian, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Spaniard, and so on.
- What is Person 1’s race? Mark one or more boxes.
- White
- Black, African Am., or Negro
- American Indian or Alaska Native — Print name of enrolled or principal tribe.
- Asian Indian
- Chinese
- Filipino
- Japanese
- Korean
- Vietnamese
- Native Hawaiian
- Guamanian or Chamorro
- Samoan
- Other Pacific Islander - Print race, for example, Fijian, Tongan, and so on.
- Other Asian - Print race, for example, Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Pakistani, Cambodian, and so on.
- Some other race - Print race.
Again, this information has already been collected on previous census forms. Now, add the proposed citizenship question:
The question doesn’t ask non-citizens whether they are here legally, nor does it ask non-citizens and naturalized citizens where they were born. However, the Census Bureau already knows the address of each household and the race of each resident in the household. The citizenship question would allow ICE to easily identify which households have non-citizen residents. They could show up at the residence and demand to see paperwork authorizing the non-citizens to be in the country. Furthermore, by combining address and citizenship status with race data, ICE could prioritize targeting non-white non-citizens.
In addition, the information already exists to allow the “administration” to target households that include a Democratic voter. In case you don’t know, your party affiliation and voting record (which elections you voted in, not the votes you cast) are already public.
[V]oter data is largely a matter of public record. It’s collected for public purposes, not private ones, and there’s no opt-out on sharing this information. Voter records may contain facts about individuals, including…
- Name
- Street address
- Party affiliation
- Elections in which you did (or did not) vote
- Phone number
- Email address
And how can the data be used? While each state sets its own rules, voter data from every state is available for some uses. If you’ve noticed poll watchers at your polling place, you were seeing voter data in action, used by a campaign to keep track of who has and has not voted, to guide phone banks and other efforts to bring out the vote. Many states put no restrictions on use, so voter data may also be used for issue politics, charitable solicitation and commercial marketing.
State-by-state rules governing the use of voter registration data are summarized here.
Side note about the public nature of voter registration data: Remember that trump tried to get all states to turn over their detailed voter registration databases, including highly sensitive information, to Kris Kobach’s “election integrity commission.”
On Wednesday the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity sent a letter giving secretaries of state about two weeks to provide about a dozen points of voter data. That also would include dates of birth, the last four digits of voters' Social Security numbers and any information about felony convictions and military status.
Many states refused to cooperate, but enough states did cooperate that there’s currently a website listing the voter registration info on more than 70 million voters from selected states for free and where you can filter results by party affiliation. A complete nationwide list is available to Presidential candidates for the low, low price of about $136K. I actually considered changing my party affiliation to Independent (in California, we call it No Party Preference or NPP) when trump took office, but decided not to because I want to be counted as a Democrat.
Back to the census: People who skip the citizenship question will still be counted, so everyone should include all residents on their census questionnaire. Skipping the question, however, may invite further scrutiny, including follow-ups by phone or in person. And they’re looking into more invasive methods of filling in any blanks:
Refusing to answer any census question, or intentionally giving a false answer to one, can result in a fine, according to federal law. And returning an incomplete census questionnaire may lead to a phone call or an in-person visit to your home by workers from the Census Bureau, which hired more than 600,000 door-knockers to follow up with households that did not respond to the 2010 census.
[…] To fill in the blanks on 2020 census forms, the bureau is planning to use, for the first time, personal information from federal and state records, such as tax returns and Medicaid applications, as well as public utility records. The Census Bureau is discussing whether to use administrative records to answer the citizenship question on incomplete questionnaires and has not made a decision yet, the Census Bureau's head of the 2020 census, Albert Fontenot, told NPR after speaking at the Population Association of America's annual meeting.
They’re planning to cross-reference census data with other “personal information from federal and state records, such as tax returns and Medicaid applications, as well as public utility records”! And maybe voter registration records as well?
Here’s another concern — could the citizenship data be used to remove people from voter rolls? If an address is flagged as housing a non-citizen, states with aggressive voter suppression campaigns could use the presence of non-citizens to arbitrarily remove all residents at the address from their voter rolls on the assumption that they’re non-citizens, too. Doing so would be just as “valid” as all the other excuses used to conduct voter purges.
One more concern — why ask naturalized citizens about the year of their naturalization? A possible reason was provided by a friend who was naturalized at birth because she was born abroad to parents who were both native-born U.S. citizens. She was born in the 50s and got her first Social Security card when she was about 8 years old, but when she was an adult, she had her wallet stolen with her Social Security card in it. When she went to her local Social Security office to apply for a replacement card, the agent told her “We didn’t have you as a citizen” because her naturalization certificate and Social Security card were issued before electronic records, and the government hadn’t digitized the paper records from pre-computer days. She hopes she’s now on file as a citizen, but she’s planning to leave the citizenship question blank because she’s afraid that if she acknowledges being naturalized in the 50s, she’ll be a target for ICE to demand proof of citizenship. She still has her naturalization certificate but would be reluctant to surrender it to ICE. She sounds a little paranoid but under this “administration,” I honestly don’t blame her a bit.
In conclusion, just how dangerous could the inclusion of the citizenship question in the census be to immigrants?
It would put a bulls-eye on households where non-citizens live, enabling ICE to target them for demands to prove legal residence.
ICE could target non-white non-citizens for harassment and intimidation before it pursues white non-citizens.
Combined with voter registration data, it could be used by states to purge voters who live in a household that includes a non-citizen off their voter rolls.
It could also enable ICE to target households that include a registered Democrat.
Even if you and those close to you are legal residents of the U.S. there are ample reasons for all of us to fear the many ways the “government” could use the citizenship question.