What Was Said
“The real controversy here is who took the citizenship question off of the census, and why? Why is it controversy wanting to know who among us happens to be a citizen and who isn’t? Why is that controversial? It would seem to me that this kind of attention should have been asked when somebody in the Obama regime decided to get rid of it.”
— Rush Limbaugh, a conservative commentator, on Friday“Why can’t we just ask the question the way it was asked for 50 years before the Obama administration yanked it out of there?”
— Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor, on Tuesday
False.
President Trump on Thursday backed away from efforts to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census after insisting that he would press on despite a Supreme Court ruling that the administration had not provided an adequate reason for including the question. Throughout his fight, a number of prominent conservative voices and members of his staff have amplified an inaccurate talking point that former President Barack Obama had eliminated the question.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mr. Trump’s former press secretary, was among the first to give the claim a wide audience when she said in March 2018 that the question had “been included in every census since 1965, with the exception of 2010, when it was removed.” At the time, 12 states had sued the Trump administration for trying to add the question.
As courts weighed in on the case and after the Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Trump, others began to echo the claim blaming Mr. Obama, including Charlie Kirk, the founder of the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA; Chuck Woolery, the game show host; the Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump blog; an anchor on One America News, a pro-Trump news network; a spokesman for the Trump campaign; and Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina.
Despite tens thousands of retweets on social media and repetition on Fox News, these claims are inaccurate. A citizenship question has appeared in some form on different census surveys since 1820, and Mr. Obama was not responsible for its omission from the decennial census. Moreover, the Census Bureau has not stopped inquiring about citizenship.
In 1940, households surveyed in the decennial census were directly asked about citizenship. A decade later, census takers asked respondents about place of birth and followed up with a question about citizenship as part of one inquiry.
The citizenship question was dropped in 1960 from the general census except in New York and Puerto Rico. In 1970, most households were not asked about citizenship, though 15 percent of respondents were asked about birthplace and 5 percent if they were citizens. The short-form census sent to most households did not ask about citizenship in 1980, 1990 and 2000, but the question was relegated to a longer version sent to a smaller portion of households.
In 2010, under Mr. Obama, the Census Bureau stopped distributing the long-form questionnaire altogether — and the citizenship question along with it. But that’s because the bureau began using an alternative survey in 2005 that also included the question.
It’s also clear that the Obama administration did not instigate efforts to replace the long-form questionnaire with the American Community Survey. Plans to do so began years earlier.
After years of testing, a series of government reports from 2002 to 2004 concluded that the American Community Survey, a separate questionnaire surveying a monthly sample of households, produced virtually the same estimates as the census long-form questionnaire. And in 2005, the survey was fully put into place.
“To deal with some of these challenges at the beginning of the decade, the 2010 census was re-engineered to build a better, faster and simpler census. The plan was to leverage technology, eliminate the long form and conduct a short-form-only decennial census,” Carlos Gutierrez, the commerce secretary under former President George W. Bush, testified to Congress in April 2008.
The American Community Survey continues to ask about citizenship, among other topics, to this day.
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