USA: A new study quantifies how a #citizenship question would likely hurt census accuracy

Contrast with Canada where citizenship has been part of the census for many years. But in current US political context, understandable how this would affect response rates:

Adding a citizenship question to U.S. census forms — a change that many Republicans in Congress and President Trump have wanted — would likely undermine the accuracy of the country’s population counts, a new peer-reviewed study shows.

The findings, published last week in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, build on earlier research by the Census Bureau and quantify longstanding concerns among opponents of the question, who fear it could derail the once-a-decade tally of U.S. residents that’s used to redistribute political representation and federal funding to communities.

Census participation levels have long varied among different demographic groups. For example, in the 2020 census, those differences helped drive the overcounting of people who identify as white and not Hispanic and the undercounting of Latinos.

Source: A new study quantifies how a citizenship question would likely hurt census accuracy