US President Donald Trump’s government on Tuesday gave up a controversial attempt to put a question about citizenship on next year’s census, handing a victory to those who argued the new item would lead to discrimination against minority residents including Filipinos living in the US.
The decision followed a Supreme Court ruling that the case for adding the citizenship question was not convincing.
Trump’s initial reaction to the ruling had been to call for a delay in the imminent printing of the 2020 census forms, holding up the census in order to allow time for a new appeal.
That bid has now been dropped, ending any chance of changing the format of the massive, once-every-decade survey.
“We’re glad the #2020Census will begin printing without a citizenship question,” said New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who led a group of states challenging the administration on the issue.
Just this Monday, Trump had been defiant, telling reporters he wanted the census to find out who was a citizen “as opposed to an illegal.”
“It is a big difference to me between being a citizen of the United States and being an illegal,” he said.
Opponents argued that the question — which has not been included since 1950 — would drive many immigrants to avoid answering out of fear of being caught up in Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
This would render them invisible, skewing the population count and resulting in fewer government resources for the areas they live in, while distorting the lines of congressional districts, which are based on numbers of residents.
This was the intention all along, said Joe Biden, the frontrunner in the contest to become the Democratic opponent to Trump in 2020 presidential elections.
“Make no mistake, the Trump Administration added a citizenship question to the Census to deliberately cut out the voices of immigrants and communities of color. It’s wrong and goes against our core values as a nation,” Biden tweeted.
The Census Bureau’s experts said that 1.6 to 6.5 million immigrants, notably Hispanics, would avoid the census or lie to census takers if faced with the citizenship question.
Based on a 2010 census, there were 17.32 million Asian-Americans in the US, including multi-racial citizens who identified themselves as part Asian.
In the US, a 2010 Census revealed there were about 3.41 million Filipinos, but Filipino-American activists said that the number of actual Filipinos could be more than 4 million.
There were also about 3.79 million Chinese, 3.18 million Indians, followed by Americans of Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Pakistani, and Cambodian extraction among others.
According to Census projections, they accounted for 5.6 percent of the total U.S. population of around 327.6 million people.
(Agence France-Presse with an Eagle News Service report)
