TO CLOSE

The chairman of a House Control Group asked if the Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, had told the truth after testifying last year about his decision to add a question on Citizenship at the 2020 Census. (March 14)
AP

DORAL, Florida – At the heart of this South Florida city, you can choose between a Cuban restaurant, a Mexican coffee shop and a Peruvian gastrobar.

But the driving force behind this booming suburb, between Miami International Airport and the Everglades, is the stream of Venezuelans who buy and apparently build every inch of it. Almost all the people you meet there have left the besieged South American country or are visiting from there.

"Doral, the best city in Venezuela," joked Aimee Sakkal, 60, who lives in Caracas, but visited her three recently displaced sons in Doral.

Reflecting its international charm, Doral stands out at the national level for another reason: non-citizens make up a relatively large part of its population.

About 38% of Doral residents are non-citizens, more than five times the national average of 7%, according to the 2013-2017 US Census Bureau survey. The survey found that more than 22 million non-citizens live in the United States.

Other communities where at least a quarter of the population is non-citizens include Union City (West New York), Plainfield and Elizabeth (New Jersey); Huntington Park, Bell Gardens, Santa Ana and Salinas, California; and Miami and Hialeah, Florida.

Non-citizens – and the search for their place of residence – were of great concern to the Trump administration.

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross attempts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 decennial census, as his department says the American Community Survey does not have enough geographic detail to sue for violating Voting Rights Act.

Ross wants information from non-citizens to be found in the census block, which can be the size of a city block and contain a handful of several hundred people. The census contains data on the population of more than 11 million census blocks nationwide.

Critics disagree with the government's case, saying the issue of citizenship is clearly a political gesture designed to dissuade members of minority communities – particularly those with many undocumented immigrants – from participating in the census.

Various groups challenged the government's plan and won three trials in US district courts: California, New York, and Maryland. The Supreme Court hears arguments in the case Tuesday.

In Doral, Edgar Chavez, 45, a real estate agent born in Venezuela who lives in the community with his wife and two sons, says it's common sense that people living with undocumented immigrants in their family or their house refuse to participate in the 2020 census.

"These people are afraid of getting on a bus to Orlando because Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are coming on board and asking for papers," he said. "Imagine when you knock on the door."

The intersection of Main Street and Paseo Boulevard in downtown Doral, Florida, a city in South Florida where the percentage of foreign-born residents is one of the highest in the country. (Photo: Alan Gomez, USA TODAY & # 39; HUI)

The last time the Census Bureau asked all respondents what their citizenship was, it was in 1950. After that date and until 2010, the question of citizenship was only asked about the long form, a subset of the census that concerned only one in six households.

Beginning with the 2010 census, the long form has been dropped for the benefit of the American Community Survey, which asks questions about citizenship. The survey concerns 1 household out of 38 each year and the lowest reported geographical level is the group of blocks (a geographic area that contains about 1,500 people).

In his request to add a question on citizenship, Arthur Gary, the attorney general of the Department of Justice, wrote that the data from the ACS left only a level of confidence 90% "and that the margin of error increased with the size of the sample – and thus the geographical area – decreases."

But a broad group of experts, including those currently working at the Census Bureau, disagreed, saying any improvements in data obtained through house-to-house census enumeration would be compromised by the fact that many minorities would not react to a difficult situation. census with a question of citizenship.

Five former census directors who served under Republican and Democratic administrations filed a brief in the Supreme Court, in which they claimed that the inclusion "at the last minute" of a citizenship issue would had not been the subject of appropriate research and that it would result in a dramatic undercount of the American population. .

George Hazel, a United States District Court Judge in Maryland, concluded that current census officials agree. In his decision to block the issue of citizenship, the judge wrote: "The Census Bureau has repeatedly, consistently and unanimously recommended against the addition of a question on citizenship to the decennial census of 2020 ".

Some former officials of the Department of Justice share the same concerns.

Vanita Gupta, who oversaw for three years the Division of Civil Rights in Justice under former President Barack Obama, said that she had never heard of any one person from his department discussing the need for more detailed data.

"There was not a single case that the Department of Justice was able to present or who could have carried away, no one could say that would have happened differently with these data, "she said.

John Gore, who was acting director of the Civil Rights Division last year under Trump, acknowledged during a testimony in the ongoing trial that "in the five decades that followed the Adoption of the law on the right to vote, no one in the Ministry of Justice had ever asked about citizenship. to be added to the decennial census. He also said that he could not identify any case of the voting rights law that the ministry had lost due to lack of sufficient data on citizenship.

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross testified in March before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. (Photo: Jose Luis Magana, AP)

Dale Ho, an ACLU attorney who heads one of the lawsuits challenging Ross' decision, said that the same was true for private organizations that regularly take legal action to enforce the law on voting rights.

"We have not needed it for 54 years of successful enforcement of the voting rights law, and nothing has been identified by justice or commerce that suddenly changes the need for voting rights. that, "said Ho.

Even one of the people cited by Ross in his A memo announcing the question of citizenship has since been published against the question of citizenship.

The secretary of commerce said his staff had consulted Nielsen, better known for its "Nielsen ratings" that have been following US consumers for nearly 100 years.

Ross argued that fears of non-citizens refusing to participate in a census involving a citizenship issue were flawed, with Nielsen officials adding questions equally sensitive to some of his inquiries and noting "no significant decrease in the response rate ".

On April 1, Nielsen's lawyers wrote in a memorial to the Supreme Court that they disagreed with Ross's findings and categorically opposed a census citizenship question.

The company needs to know as much as possible where people live, what they look at and how they spend their money. His lawyers argued that a question on citizenship in the census would undeniably undermine the accuracy of the census by significantly underestimating the minority communities.

Nielsen's lawyers argued that such undercoverage would adversely affect the accuracy of Nielsen's products and decisions made by hospitals, banks, utilities and innumerable companies. who rely on accurate census data to customize their products and plan future expansions.

"Such erroneous corporate decisions will hurt not only US consumers, but also US companies that serve them," Nielsen's lawyers wrote.

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