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There are many reasons. They discuss poverty in the article. I would agree with cultural distrust of government officials. And very importantly, everything arou
by bo1024 6y ago
There are many reasons. They discuss poverty in the article. I would agree with cultural distrust of government officials. And very importantly, everything around the citizenship question/issue.
> The notion of these counts ever being used for enforcement — basically targeting high population, low citizenship-count blocks for ICE raids or whatever — that would be really, really problematic.
Stepping back, think in general about a government that wants to target, arrest, and deport certain groups of people, that is also going door to door and trying to establish records of who everyone is and where they live. Because of the bad optics of this, the US census has traditionally been extremely independent from law enforcement. The government has recently been attacking this barrier e.g. with the citizenship question and other things discussed in the article. Historically speaking, you might argue marginalized groups in such scenarios would be foolish to trust the census.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agothink in general about a government that wants to target, arrest, and deport certain groups of people Yes. They are deporting people who didn't come into the country legally. Its important to have an accurate count of citizens in the country since that's who votes. There is an upcoming Supreme Court case that will determine if non citizens should be counted for House representation. You may not agree with it, but it is important to know. With that said, I don't think ending the census early is the right way to handle this issue at all, it's just slimy.
- jimktrains2 6y agoThe constitution specifically says the census is a count of all "free Persons", not only citizens. Obviously SCOTUS will weigh in now, but I think it's important to realize the actual wording of what the census is.
- kevinmchugh 6y ago14th amendment drops the "free"
- jimktrains2 6y agoWhile also striking the 3/5 compromise, so I don't think it changes the reading.
- cafard 6y agoIt uses the term "free Persons" but the context is "their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons". So "all other Persons", i.e. slaves, were counted.
- jimktrains2 6y agoWell, the 3/5 compromise has been removed, but even still are you arguing that immigrants aren't people or aren't free, i.e. not slaves.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Broken_Hippo 6y agoPrisoners aren't free, but they still use infrastructure and I'm pretty sure they are supposed to be counted in the census.
- jimktrains2 6y agoThey are, because they are free in that they are not slaves. Prisoners still have a plethora of constitutional rights.
- Broken_Hippo 6y agoThe amendment against slavery excludes prisoners: Sometimes, they are, indeed, slaves. And yeah, they have rights. But they don't have the right to freedom as we know it nor do they have the right not to be slaves.
- jimktrains2 6y agoYou act as though there is a single freedom, which is not the case by any means. The amendment carves out specific exemptions for prisoners for certain things, but that doesn't make them chattal slaves, nor does it remove the rest of their rights, e.g. cruel and unusual punishment, ability to have representation, or have their speech curtailed.
- CyberRabbi 6y agoYour interpretation would imply they intended non-citizen native Americans to be counted in the Census.
- jimktrains2 6y agoThe original text and the 14th amendment both excluded untaxed indians from the apportionment for the house of representatives. So, they could ask to be counted, but there is no mandate to count them.
- kevinmchugh 6y agoThe constitution never said to count the people who vote. If you wanted to know that, just count how many people vote.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoThe constitution also doesn't preclude counting who is able to vote. The constitution places limits on the government, but we can add things that act within those bounds. Asking about citizenship falls within those bounds.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoArticle 1 Clause 3 requires enumeration of all free persons.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoYes. Again, counting citizens does not also preclude counting free persons. We already gather data on peoples race and religion, proving that we can gather more data than just headcount, and citizenship information has already been gathered between 1950 and 2000.
- jimktrains2 6y agoCounting only citizens does preclude counting all free persons. (If you're speaking about counting all but considering citizenship a demographic, that's legal and used to be done iirc, but was dropped as it was feared it would disincentivize non-citizen being counted. The recent court case about the citizenship question was settled by the courts because of administrative procedure, not the legality of the question.) Moreover, collecting demographics data is orthogonal and I'm not sure why you're bringing it up.
- solstice 6y agoDutch census recording religion enabled the Nazis to quickly round up the Jews living there a few years later during the occupation
- pessimizer 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
- hirundo 6y agoData from the U.S. census of 1940 was used to round up Japanese Americans and put them into internment camps. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/03/secret-use-of-census-info-helped-send-japanese-americans-to-internment-camps-in-wwii/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/03...
- WillPostForFood 6y agoBecause of the bad optics of this, the US census has traditionally been extremely independent from law enforcement. The government has recently been attacking this barrier e.g. with the citizenship question Two points on history and tradition. The census was originally carried out by the US Marshals. That should indicate the importance and weight of the project. The citizenship question was part of the census until 2000 (1950 short form, 2000 long form). If you are using the census to distribute voting power to states, and the distribution is based on count of citizens, not people, then it is a fair question to ask.
- spacemanmatt 6y agoThe census is used to fairly apportion infrastructure to areas where people actually live. That this is done by representation is an artifact of our political system, not the Constitutional mandate that requires he census. It's not a fair question, as you say.
- spacemanmatt 6y agoYou don't have to like it.
- matthewmcg 6y agoThe distribution of voting power is based on population, not citizenship. Non-citizens need to be counted too.
- nonplussed 6y agoOnly citizens can vote.
- hobs 6y agoIt doesn't matter - when the document was written America had tons of non-citizens and those people were counted. Slaves couldn't vote either, but in the famous compromise were counted as a portion of a person - the distribution of political power is why.