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1 Thomas P. Wolf & Brianna Cea, A Critical History of the United States Census and Citizenship Questions 1 (2019)

handle is hein.brennan/ctlhuscen0001 and id is 1 raw text is: A Critical History of the United States Census and Citizenship Questions THOMAS P. WOLF* & BRIANNA CEA** On March 26, 2018, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced that the 2020 Census would ask about the citizenship status of every person in the country. Since this announcement, the Trump Administration has relied heavily on broad historical arguments to defend Secretary Ross's decision. In both the courts of law and the court of public opinion, the Administration has repeatedly insisted that Secretary Ross's citizenship question has a deep historical pedigree stretching back more than two centuries. This historical narrative, however, is misleading where it is not outright false. This Article the first scholarly rejoinder to the Trump Administration's use of history in the citizenship question cases demonstrates that the Administration's historical account is flawed in at least two significant respects. First, the census has never asked for the citizenship status of everyone in the country. Secretary Ross's proposal is therefore historically unprecedented. Second, the Administration relies on an impoverished view of census history to suggest that Secretary Ross can find a historical warrant for his decision in citizenship questions that were posed only to small subsets of the population at various points in American history. Viewed in context, these citizenship questions originated as sporadic components of an approach to census-taking that the Census Bureau long ago rejected as incompatible with its foundational, constitutional goal of actual enumeration. These early citizenship questions were part of an increasingly sprawling census that was attempting with mounting difficulties to pursue two objectives at once: first, counting everyone; and second, collecting additional information that was used for a mixture of collateral statistical, political, and economic objectives. In the wake of the 1950 Census, the Census Bureau rejected this older paradigm of census practice in favor of a radically different model. Indeed, once social science techniques like sampling granted the Bureau the technical ability to identify and remedy substantial problems in its approach to the enumeration, the * Thomas P. Wolf is Counsel with the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. © 2019, Thomas P. Wolf & Brianna Cea. ** Brianna Cea is a Research & Program Associate with the Democracy Center at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York School of Law. The authors would like to thank Anna Aguillard, Margo Anderson, Justin Levitt, Michael Li, Annie Lo, Terri Ann Lowenthal, Peter Miller, Emily Mills, Mireya Navarro, Kelly Percival, Dale Robinson, Yurij Rudensky, Jack Sztrigler, Wendy Weiser, and Corrine Yu for their feedback, edits, and advice over the course of writing this Article.

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