Census Directors & Unions Fight Proposal to Count Illegals in 2010
Six former Census Bureau directors united this week to oppose Sen. David Vitter’s (R-LA) proposal to add a question on citizenship and immigration status to the 2010 census.
In a letter released by Census Project, a group of census stakeholders, the former Census Bureau directors urged Congress not to adopt Vitter’s amendment to the Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill, which would deny federal funds to the 2010 Census if it did not include questions regarding United States citizenship.
The former Census Bureau directors note in the letter that census questions are usually submitted two or three years before Census Day, and that a change to the questionnaire at this point would be impossible, writing that: “Such a massive revision could not be accomplished in time to conduct the census on its currently envisioned schedule...The resulting cost to the taxpayer is almost incalculable.”
Todd Zinser, the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Commerce, affirmed this last week in a Senate subcommittee hearing in which he said: “With address canvassing finished and enumeration activities soon to begin, little opportunity remains to affect the 2010 census or make major course corrections.”
Sen. Vitter proposed the amendment last week, a mere six months before Census Day on April 1, 2010. In a statement, the senator justified his proposal by saying that: “In the past, some states have included illegal immigrants during the census, resulting in the allocation of additional congressional seats... [this amendment] obviously won’t help us identify all illegal aliens, but it’s a step in the right direction. Illegal aliens should not be included for the purposes of determining representation in Congress, and that’s the bottom line here.”
Although no solid estimates could be made as to how much Sen. Vitter’s amendment would cost, the Census Project indicated that it could put the $7 billion that the Bureau has already spent at risk. Former Census Bureau director Kenneth Prewitt told NewMajority that “the questionnaires are already being printed as we speak.”
The proposal seems to have taken those familiar with the census by surprise. On October 6th, a day before Sen. Vitter tabled his amendment, Prewitt said in an interview with NewMajority that “there have been no major changes in the census in the last several months, and none anticipated.”
The SEIU, one of the United States’ most powerful unions, rallied members and supporters today in opposition to Sen. Vitter’s amendment. The union accused the senator and those supporting the amendment of being “willing to compromise the accuracy of the census in their obsessive desire to inject their anti-immigrant agenda into every conceivable realm of public life.”
When NewMajority asked SEIU why a union would get involved in census issues, Executive Vice President Eliseo Medina said: “SEIU has long been deeply committed to expanding the civic engagement and political participation of Latino and other immigrant communities... We cannot repeat the mistakes of the 2000 Census, which cost the Latino community billions in federal dollars because of an estimated 3 percent undercount of the population.”
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, explained it differently, noting that “SEIU has been intimately involved in pushing amnesty and related [immigration] issues because their membership is so heavily illegal immigrant.”
This week’s census developments come after a Senate sub-committee hearing last week that revealed that the Census Bureau botched nearly 36,000 criminal background checks and was looking at close to $4 billion in cost-overruns.
Today, six days after the hearing, Census Bureau Director Dr. Robert Groves released a statement addressing the failed background checks, noting that fingerprint background checks had never been done by the Census Bureau before, and was an attempt to make the census safer than in any previous enumeration, Indeed, Dr. Groves noted that the Census Bureau’s “procedures to protect the public go further than required.”
With efforts being made to ensure that criminal background check failures are not repeated for the Census’s non-responsive follow-up canvassing, the Census Bureau must now turn its attention to the possibility that all their efforts heretofore may have been wasted if Senator Vitter’s amendment passes.