PLEASANT RIDGE, MI – Pretty much everyone knows that the federal government counts everyone, or tries to, with a nationwide census on April 1 once every decade. That’s been happening since 1790.
For most of our history, the census, one of the few government duties required by the Constitution, hasn’t been very controversial, except when it has been challenged, largely by urban mayors, who have complained their population has been under counted.
This year, however, is different:
President Donald Trump had been fighting to add a question to the census asking people whether or not they are citizens – and until last week was apparently continuing to do so despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
But why does all this matter so much?
Nearly everyone agrees, for example, that Michigan is bound to lose yet another seat in Congress, because other states have grown faster. Since redistricting will now be done by an independent coalition rather than the politicians, does a precise count really matter?
“Beyond a doubt, yes,” said Kurt Metzger, perhaps the one person in the state in the best position to know. Metzger, 72, who has been a demographer throughout his career, is a Cincinnati native who worked for the U.S. Census Bureau for both the 1980 and 1990 cycles, and went on to run a university center and then found a major population research center, Data Driven Detroit.
But he now also sees things from another perspective, as the mayor of Pleasant Ridge, a small city in the Detroit suburbs.
“So much depends on the census, for every community, and so few people understand it,” he said.
“Everybody knows about redistricting. What they don’t know is that virtually all government decisions, decisions about programs, about social services, about funding are based on the census.”
For the next decade, the count taken on April 1, 2020 will be the only completely official enumeration. “Think about it – if you are a community trying to promote yourself to attract business, this will be the only official count of how many people you have, and where in the counties and states people actually live,” he said.
Metzger is a nonpartisan mayor, and has worked with both Republicans and Democrats throughout his career. But he is alarmed by the politicization of the census, and especially by President Trump’s insistence on trying to include a citizenship question.
“This has never been the case before. It has always been accepted that you just do the census, and try to get an accurate a count as possible. In the past, there has always just been a question of whether Congress would adequately fund the census.
But why there such resistance to asking people whether or not they are U.S. citizens? Information collected by the census has never been supplied to, say, immigration authorities.
“Because of the politicized atmosphere and the perception that the administration is hostile to immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants,” he said. “People who traditionally have been hard to find are going to deliberately avoid answering the census.
“They don’t believe the information may not be used for raids to discover them. Currently, the nation has about 43 million foreign-born residents, and 22 million who aren’t citizens – half of whom may be undocumented, he said. If asked about their citizenship, there are estimates that as many as 6.5 million may avoid being counted.
“Being missed has no bearing on their immigration status, but could be hugely harmful to the places they live,” because they will miss out on funding and other opportunities tied to the official count.
“I’m very pessimistic,” he said.
The census has never been completely accurate, if course, and despite everyone’s best efforts, Metzger said an estimated one percent of the population was missed in the 2010 census.
That count found a national population of 308.7 million, a number that demographers estimate has risen to 329 million today.
Michigan, which was hit especially hard by the Great Recession of 2008-9, was the only state in the nation to lose population in the decade before 2010, falling to a little less than 9.9 million people.
The state is growing again, Metzger said, and now has more than 10 million. But other states, especially in the south and west, have grown much faster, and Michigan is projected to lose another seat in Congress, declining to 13 members of the U.S. House.
That will make six seats the state has lost since 1980 – almost a third of the state’s political clout. That gives even more urgency to trying to find as many people as possible.
Historically, certain groups traditionally have been under counted – the poor, small children, African-American males, and fathers who may or may not live with their families.
“But there’s also been an over count of some groups as well,” he said. Those include more affluent “snowbirds,” with vacation homes in Florida, and students who are away at school. They may return a census form in East Lansing, say, but also be reported by their parents back where they grew up.
There are some bright spots. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is making a major effort to get a complete count, and recently succeeded in getting a $5 million appropriation to help do so. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan is totally committed to seeing the census find as many people as possible in Detroit, which has been losing population since 1950.
The big unknown: How next year’s switch to a largely online count will affect the result.
Kurt Metzger hopes that in the end, all these efforts will effectively counter what President Trump is doing, which he sees as deliberately designed to under count certain groups.
“I have to say that this is about as anti-American as you can possibly be – to be against an accurate census,” he finally said, adding that for the nation’s sake, he hopes his worst fears aren’t realized.
