bad news for the 2020 census

[snickfic]

Trump Administration Creates Census Crisis With Move to Suppress Immigrant Responses

The 2020 census will include a question about US citizenship for the first time since 1950, the Commerce Department announced Monday night. Civil rights groups say the question will massively depress responses from immigrants fearful of deportation and could sabotage the entire census.

The move sets up a huge legal and political battle over one of the most important tasks mandated by the Constitution. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and former US Attorney General Eric Holder have already announced their intention to sue the Trump administration over the new question. Democratic members of Congress have also said they will introduce legislation to block the new question.

Call your reps!

EDIT: Suggested call scripts in the comments of this post!

Comments

some scripts

[redbird]

5calls.org suggested calling the Department of Commerce as well as your reps. Here are a couple of scripts, edited a bit from theirs. What I used for Congress/Senate:

"Hi, my name is [Name] and I’m a constituent from [City].

"I'm calling to urge the senator to oppose adding a question about citizenship status to the 2020 Census. Adding this question would skew the census count by discouraging immigrants from participating, and reduce federal funding to Massachusetts and other states with significant immigrant populations."

If you're calling from a state with fewer immigrants, 5Calls suggests something like

"I'm calling to urge [the representative/senator/department of commerce] to strongly oppose the addition of an untested question about citizenship status to the 2020 Census. Adding this question will skew the census count by discouraging immigrants from participating, thus blocking states from receiving sufficient federal funding."

For the Department of Commerce, I replaced the last sentence with

"This would block states from getting federal funding, and make all sorts of planning more difficult, because census data is used for many other purposes."

Also, there's something wrong with the link in this post. Try:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/trump-administration-creates-census-crisis-with-move-to-suppress-immigrant-responses/

Re: some scripts

[wendelah1]

Thanks for this.

[teaotter]

Thank you!