Citizenship question will hurt Illinois they claim/ I thought illegals don't vote

Editorial Board  Chicago Tribune  March 2018

Illinois’ economic and government dysfunction manifests itself in countless ways. One of the most damaging is population loss. People keep packing up and moving out because taxes smother them and government doesn’t stoke job growth — it hinders it.

So a state that keeps losing people year after year — a net 33,703 fewer residents in 2017 — needs the most accurate count possible of who’s left. Why? Population is a basis for how many billions of dollars in federal money Illinois gets annually. It also dictates representation in the U.S. House, the Electoral College, and factors into setting boundaries for federal, state and local government districts.

Which brings us to the 2020 census. The Trump administration has decided to include in the census a question about citizenship status. Getting an accurate count of the nation’s citizens, the administration contends, would allow better enforcement of the Voting Rights Act on behalf of disenfranchised minorities.

Really? Sounds like a smokescreen, especially when you consider it was the Justice Department that initially asked the Commerce Department, which oversees the census, to add the citizenship question. Justice’s top gun, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has long objected to Voting Rights Act provisions that create extra burdens for some states, including his home state of Alabama.

The real reason for the citizenship question, critics say, is to whittle down the population count in predominantly urban Democratic regions, often home to large immigrant populations. The Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies have struck fear in immigrants living here legally and illegally. In areas such as metropolitan Chicago, asking a citizenship question raises the likelihood that many immigrants might say no thanks to the census altogether.

That would skew the count, and could unfairly help Republicans in 2021, when national and state redistricting begins. Remember, the constitutional mandate of the census is a count of everyone in the country — citizen and noncitizen.

What does this mean for Illinois? With its sizable Latino population, Illinois stands to get less than its rightful share of federal funding and see its political clout weakened; this state is sure to lose one of its 18 U.S. House seats but could lose two. Those factors explain why Illinois is one of at least 11 states that are gearing up to sue to keep the Trump administration from including the citizenship question in the census. California filed its own suit Monday.

The Trump team professes to not know what the fuss is about. The citizenship question, says White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has been “included in every census since 1965, with the exception of 2010, when it was removed.”

Wrong. The citizenship question hasn’t been on the decennial census since 1950. Citizenship status has been included in surveys of smaller samples of the population, such as the American Community Survey, but that’s a far cry from the decennial census, which reaches every household.

The multistate effort to get Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to reverse inclusion of the citizenship question is the right fight. The damage that could be done to Illinois and the other states would be considerable and lasting. Yes, much of this state’s government and economic plight is self-inflicted. A census undercount would only make that plight worse.