If he wants it sooner, in statistical terms, it’d be like launching D-Day after a month’s preparation.
T rump wants a new census.
If, by this, he means a snap-census before the scheduled 2030 survey, he’s demanding that the federal government undertake a gargantuan task with minimal planning and no discernible source of funding.
In statistical terms, it’d be like launching D-Day after a month’s preparation.
If the White Queen believes six impossible things before breakfast, that the Census Bureau could pull this off would qualify as one of them.
The agency couldn’t even competently conduct the last, regularly scheduled census in 2020.
Given that conducting the census is a core function of the federal government — indeed, mandated by the Constitution — it is outrageous that the last survey missed so badly. It undercounted Florida and a handful of other red states (as well as Illinois) and overcounted New York and a number of blue states (plus, Ohio and Utah).
Because the apportionment of congressional seats depends on population as determined by the census, these were highly consequential errors that can’t be allowed to happen again. There’s no legal mechanism for fixing it, though. We just have to do better in 2030.
Trump is also, understandably, chagrined that illegal immigrants are included in the census and declares that, going forward, they “WILL NOT BE COUNTED.” Here he’s going to run smack into the relevant legal texts.
Article 1 Section 2 of the Constitution refers to “the Whole Number of free Persons,” while the 14th amendment says “the whole number of persons in each State.” In similar fashion, the U.S. code calls for a “tabulation of total population by States.”
So it’s hard to see how illegal immigrants can be excluded from the count. As it happens, they don’t seem to have much of an effect on the partisan breakdown of congressional seats one way or the other. Although the highest number of illegal immigrants live in California, they are spread around the country and there are also large numbers in Texas and Florida.
A change that Trump wanted in the 2020 census was the inclusion, once again, of a citizenship question. This is highly relevant information that is entirely appropriate to ask about.
There was a long period from the 19th century through 1950 when the survey had a citizenship question. Then, it was relegated to the so-called “long form.” Finally, the long form itself was axed after 2000.
Now, it’s considered a scandal to even think about reviving it. Trump’s proposal to ask the question on the 2020 census encountered stiff resistance, and the Supreme Court squashed it.
By the way, non-citizens do have a notable impact on congressional apportionment. Recent research by the Center for Immigration Studies found that all immigrants (naturalized citizens as well as all other categories of immigrants), shifted 14 congressional seats to Democratic states on net in 2020.
Non-citizens also distort the composition of congressional districts. According to the study, there are the same number of citizens in the 13 congressional districts with the highest share of non-citizens as in the nine districts with the lowest share of non-citizens. In other words, the citizens in those nine low-immigration districts get four fewer representatives than the citizens in the 13 high-immigration districts.
It’s one man, one vote — with an asterisk.
To take an example from Texas, the Democratic-held 33rd district, where non-citizens are nearly 30 percent of the population, has 208,000 fewer voting-age citizens than the state’s 21st district. So the citizens in the 33rd district have marginally more clout and representation, thanks to a population tilted toward those who can’t vote.
Ultimately, the way to diminish these effects is to reduce the level of immigration. Early indications are that there has been a large exodus of illegal immigrants since Trump’s election, and the U.S. will have net negative migration for the first time in a half century.
If Trump wants to fully capture the changes he’s effecting in immigration policy, he should indeed want a new census — in 2030.
© 2025 by King Features Syndicate