How MAGA’s census fight would reshape political power

Ronald Brownstein, Tribune News Service

The battle over the 2030 Census is intensifying — and compounding concerns about President Donald Trump’s broader moves to suppress the political power of the nation’s growing non-White population. As in Trump’s first term, Republicans in the executive branch, in Congress and at the state level are advancing proposals to exclude undocumented immigrants — and possibly the much larger population of all residents who are not citizens — from the decennial Census count used to apportion House seats and Electoral College votes. Supporters typically frame those proposals as ways to prevent noncitizens from influencing the distribution of political power. But excluding either the undocumented or the broader group of all noncitizens would also shift influence between citizens — from non-Whites to Whites and from city residents to rural and exurban America.

New research from the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California provided exclusively to me makes clear that eliminating either the undocumented or all noncitizens from the Census count would severely dilute the political clout of minority citizens. The reason is straightforward: although the immigrant population has diffused in recent decades, it still is concentrated mostly in states and counties that are already racially diverse. As a result, erasing immigrants from the calculations used to distribute political power will inexorably “disenfranchise citizen people of color,” says Manuel Pastor, the Equity Research Institute’s director.

And because immigrants mostly congregate in the nation’s largest urban centers, excluding them would also mean less political power for the information-economy urban professionals who flock to those places too. Over 24 million noncitizens live in the US; that’s about 7% of the total population. Removing some or all of them from the Census count has long been a MAGA priority. In Trump’s first term, the administration sought to add a question to the 2020 Census asking people about their citizenship status. In 2019, the Supreme Court stopped that effort, but only on procedural grounds. (A five-Justice majority ruled that the Commerce Department essentially fabricated the reasons it offered for including the question.) The ruling made clear that if the administration conducted a defensible administrative process, the Constitution permits the government to ask about citizenship (which it had done in all but one decennial Census from 1820 to 1950).

After that ruling, the administration abandoned its attempt to add a citizenship question. But in July 2020, Trump, in an unprecedented move, ordered the Census to expunge undocumented immigrants to “the maximum extent feasible” from the population counts used for reapportionment. Lower courts blocked Trump’s directive, but in December 2020, the Supreme Court overturned those decisions. The GOP-appointed majority ruled that it was premature to render a verdict on the legality of excluding the undocumented. That choice drew a stinging dissent from Justice Stephen Breyer and the other Democratic-appointed Justices. Breyer, who retired in 2022, noted that both the 14th Amendment, and the 1929 legislation setting the modern rules for the reapportionment process, require the federal government to base the calculations on “the whole number of persons in each State.” Breyer wrote: “The Government’s effort to remove (undocumented people) from the apportionment base is unlawful, and I believe this Court should say so.”

The issue became moot when Joe Biden won the presidency and immediately repealed Trump’s order. But the Court majority’s refusal to rule on the underlying question has encouraged Republicans to press further. With both legislation and litigation, congressional and state Republicans have continued to push measures to require a citizenship question in 2030 and to exclude all or some noncitizens from the population numbers used for apportionment. Most consequentially, Trump last summer posted on social media that he will ensure that “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS.” In what could be a first step in that direction, the Census Bureau recently announced that it may include a citizenship question in a test of the 2030 Census it is conducting this year.

During Trump’s first term, a major Census study found that adding a citizenship question would depress participation from Hispanic, Asian and other communities with many noncitizens. Fears that a citizenship question would discourage minority participation are even more acute today against the backdrop of Trump’s urban ICE storm. “In any environment we’d be worried about a citizenship question, but in the current environment it is a scary question for people to (face),” says Meeta Anand, senior director of the census and data equity program at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

If a citizenship question triggers a greater undercount of minority residents, Anand points out, it would unfairly dilute their political influence even if the rules for apportionment aren’t formally changed; a larger undercount would also undermine the goal of accurately measuring the population, which drives the distribution of federal funding and shapes planning decisions by many other institutions, from businesses to colleges and universities. The Equity Research Institute analysis underscores how much not only immigrant communities but U.S. citizen racial minorities have at stake in this confrontation. The analysis shows that states with the largest population of noncitizens also tend to be among those with the largest share of non-White people in their citizen population.

Excluding noncitizens from the reapportionment of House seats and Electoral College votes will unavoidably shift power between the states, away from states with more immigrants and toward the states with fewer of them — which also are mostly places with few minority citizens. The impact on power within the states would be at least as profound. Looking across the nation’s 400 most populous counties, the Institute again found that places with more non-citizens also tend to house the most non-White US citizens. Whether you look only at undocumented immigrants or all noncitizens, excluding either group in the next redistricting would mean less representation in Congress and state legislatures for places like Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Phoenix, New York City and Miami. It would mean more political clout for exurban and rural areas, which tend to have more White residents and less for the big, diverse metro centers driving the 21st-century economy.

With these cascading consequences, the renewed efforts to purge immigrants from the Census are best understood as another prong in a Trump administration agenda that includes attempts to further weaken the Voting Rights Act and to ban birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants; Trump’s claims of systematic voting fraud in racially diverse urban centers; and the Republican legislation to require proof of citizenship for voting (which would disproportionately disqualify minorities). All these maneuvers, as Pastor says, are intended “to reduce the political power” of non-White citizens “and help to lock in minority White representation” — precisely as people of color already represent a majority of America’s youth population, and remain on track to become a majority of the overall population in the 2040s. Trump won’t get the final word on the 2030 Census — that will belong to the president elected in 2028 — but he’s refining the equation for using the next count to subtract minority political power and further divide the nation.