I was playing peek-a-boo the other day with my son, who is currently obsessed, and as I was saying “I see you…” the ending refrain stuck with me. What it means to be seen by our government can mean vastly different things to different people, striking a range of sentiments from skepticism to fear, gratitude, or pride.
One of the most important positive mechanisms of being seen by the federal government happens through the census count every 10 years. The information collected in the census is used to make voting maps, decide the number of congressional representatives each state receives, distribute billions of dollars in federal funding, and guide policy for a range of issues from education to healthcare. This is all based on who is seen, counted, and recognized by our government.
What we cannot see, the things we choose not to measure, cannot be analyzed or addressed.
Our work at IRI heavily depends on publicly available data that are representative of the full U.S. population and labor force, including the Current Population Survey, Decennial Census, and American Community Survey.
Last week, the federal administration released a proposal for how the government will conduct the next census count in 2030. As Hansi Lo Wang put it in a piece from NPR:
“This proposal outlines an unprecedented exclusion of non-U.S. citizens without a green card from a key set of 2030 census results that the 14th Amendment says must include the “whole number of persons in each state.”…While the country’s past tallies beginning in 1790 had specific instructions from the Constitution about how to count enslaved people and not to count “Indians not taxed,” the U.S. census has never left out residents because of their immigration status.”
The federal administration’s proposal would also:
- Stop collecting information about ethnicity and race, which has been a feature of the census since the first count in 1790, risks future federal data used for redistricting, enforcing the Voting Rights Act and other anti-discrimination protections, and informing policymaking.
- Ban the inclusion of a question about people’s sexual orientation, limiting our ability to protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination.
These proposed changes, which will almost certainly face legal challenges, will distort the accuracy of what we know about our society. That’s crucial because the responses to the decennial census count are the bedrock of our society—the information produced is critical to sound policymaking and the protection of civil and worker’s rights.
Businesses, researchers, healthcare providers, governments, and community organizations all use information about populations to understand what’s happening and make informed decisions. Race and ethnicity are part of that picture, just like age, geography, employment, education, and other characteristics.
We all need to be counted in order to be seen.
Addressing racial and gender disparities requires federal agencies that enforce anti-discrimination laws to collect targeted data. Without data on these characteristics, how can we identify and solve inequities? How can the government protect residents it cannot see?
We see you and we will continue to work towards having an accurate census count in 2030 that produces sound information about who we are. And we will continue to highlight the experiences that noncitizens of all races, ethnicities, genders, and religious backgrounds experience in this country, because we are all better off for their choice to move here.