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    The 2020 US Census Could Threaten Human Rights

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    On July 21, President Donald Trump signed an unprecedented memo directing the commerce secretary to collect data on undocumented immigrants and remove them from the final population totals. The memo follows up on a July 2019 executive order that assigned the Census Bureau to determine how many residents are US citizens.

    It remains unclear how this plan — seemingly a workaround the Supreme Court decision that blocked the administration from including a question about citizenship on the census — would be enforced or survive a legal challenge. However, removing undocumented immigrants from the population totals would have the effect of distorting the count, thus diminishing political representation and federal funding for states with larger undocumented populations.

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    The decennial census, enshrined in the US Constitution, was conceived to count all residents of the country — regardless of citizenship or eligibility to vote — as a basis for taxation and the regular reapportionment of seats in the House of Representatives among the various states. In March 2018, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced that for the first time in 70 years, the 2020 census would include a question about citizenship status for all households. After months of court battles, the Supreme Court issued a complicated ruling that kept the question off the census, noting that the administration’s rationale for adding the item was contrived.

    Nonetheless, recent surveys by civil society groups indicate that Latino communities remain fearful of participating in the census: as a result of the controversy, many mistakenly believe that a question about citizenship status will still appear and fear that census data could be shared with law enforcement or other government agencies. Now, the Trump administration seems determined to work around the Supreme Court ruling, noting that it is the “policy of the United States to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status under the Immigration and Nationality Act.”

    The ramifications of removing undocumented immigrants from the count loom large as census information is used not just for congressional apportionment, but also for the allocation of an estimated $900 billion in federal funding for programs on issues such as nutrition, public health, housing, transportation, education, law enforcement and environmental protection. International human rights law — including the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) — recognizes the rights to education, health and an adequate standard of living.

    Distorted census results would damage the protection of these fundamental human rights by putting communities with large immigrant populations at risk of limited access to essential services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this seems particularly punishing. Further, an undercount would place certain states at a political disadvantage in terms of proportional representation in Washington, undermining the fundamental democratic principle that voters should have equal power to choose their representatives. Removing undocumented immigrants from the census count would ensure that everyone in the country, both citizens and residents, ultimately suffer.

    The Trump administration has come to be associated with a xenophobic, exclusionary and race-based conception of American identity. Indeed, President Donald Trump has stood apart from all of his recent predecessors in displaying open hostility toward immigrants, asylum seekers and other vulnerable and minority groups. The president has proposed dramatic new restrictions on legal immigration and pledged to abrogate birthright citizenship — the constitutional guarantee that those born in the United States, whether or not their parents are citizens, have a right to citizenship. As a result, this proposal, beyond its harmful practical impact, has been criticized as an effort to enforce that identity.

    The proposal can also be seen as part of a larger pattern in which politicians seek to define American political membership, determine voters’ political identity according to demography and then maximize their chances at the polls through the manipulation of district boundaries or the rules of voting eligibility. In effect, a census that undercounts immigrant populations and distorts reapportionment could amount to an enormous partisan gerrymandering exercise. Like all such efforts, this would undermine the fundamental democratic principle that voters should have equal power to choose their representatives rather than representatives choosing their voters, further eroding the idea that elected officials should serve and appeal to all segments of society. Everyone in the country, both citizens and residents, would ultimately suffer from such an outcome.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Donald Trump and the “Kung Flu”

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      Over the course of his 2016 campaign and his subsequent presidential term, Donald Trump has sought to exploit popular fears of foreigners and certain American ethnicities to his political advantage. His verbal attacks have been selective. Irish, Italian and Polish Americans, for example, have proved immune to his insults (at least in his public utterances). Trump’s favorite targets for public abuse have been Hispanics, especially individuals seeking to enter the country clandestinely along the border with Mexico. He has also complained bitterly and profanely, in a semi-public setting, about immigrants from Haiti and sub-Saharan African countries.

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      This is hardly the end of things. Early on in his administration, Trump imposed a ban, which was overturned by courts, on all Muslims seeking to enter the United States based on popular fears of terrorism. Very much unlike his two predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who were careful to distinguish between terrorists and the followers of Islam, Trump sought to equate Muslims in general with terrorism, thereby inflaming existing popular fears.

      Classic Demagoguery

      Then came COVID-19, a disease that has taken the lives of nearly 168,000 of Americans to date. After some initial hesitation, Trump labeled it “kung flu.” To cheers and wild laughter at mass rallies and other public events, the president has sought to deflect widespread criticism of his handling of the pandemic by blaming the Chinese — not merely the government but the people in general — conflating the Chinese martial art of kung fu with influenza to the delight of his followers.

      All this, of course, is classic demagoguery intended to mobilize Trump’s base of whites with less than a college education and win him their renewed support at the polls in November. The fact that he actually appears to believe what he is saying adds to the appeal of his message. 

      Trump’s demagogic appeals have consequences for those targeted by his abuse. Using data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, researchers have reported a substantial decline in hate crimes committed against Asian Americans over the periods 2003-07 and 2014-18.  Asian Americans appeared to be well on their way to acceptance by their fellow citizens. The arrival of COVID-19 arrested this development and turned it around. So that, for example, in the three months ending on July 1, another source reported over 800 discrimination and harassment incidents, including 81 assaults, aimed at Asian Americans in California alone. 

      The situation of American Muslims is somewhat different. For members of this religious minority, there was no reversal of the trend toward greater acceptance, simply a continuation of widespread animus. Illustratively, as reported in The Daily Beast, in the two months following the murder of 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, by Brenton Tarrant, a young Australian man who reported being a “fan” of Trump, mosques in San Diego, California, New Haven, Connecticut, and Queens, New York, became the targets of arson attacks.

      These crimes were simply the most menacing of some hundreds of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States that followed upon the Christchurch killings. Abbas Barzegar, the director of a national watchdog organization that tracks anti-Muslim bias incidents, told The Daily Beast in 2019, “We’ve already reported over 500 incidences of anti-Muslim bias or harassment just this year so far.” Barzegar went on to say that the uptick in anti-Muslim events began in 2015 and continued unabated thereafter.

      Poisonous Atmosphere

      For how much of this is Trump responsible? The answer is not easily quantifiable, but at a minimum, we can say Trump has done little to qualm the poisonous atmosphere in the country. At a maximum, we can claim he has sought to promote a politics of inter-group hatred to advance his career and improve his chances of reelection.

      There is a striking contradiction in this situation. As Trump and his base insult or, in some cases, physically assault Chinese Americans and Muslims, holding the Chinese responsible for COVID-19, individual members of such now stigmatized groups have been busy trying to save Americans from the disease. A long list of Chinese American epidemiologists, emergency room physicians and virologists, led perhaps by Dr. David Ho (director of the Aaron Diamond Research Center at Columbia University) and Dr. Thomas Tsai (Brigham and Women’s Hospital), have been playing vital roles in fighting the disease, often at the risk of their own lives.

      About the same applies to America Muslims from both the Middle East and South Asia. The list here would have to include Dr. Ashish Jha (director of Harvard Global Health Institute), Mahrokh Irani (Harvard Global Health Institute), Dr. Najy Masai and Dr. Imran Siddiqui. Of course, the list could be extended.

      Will these performances by Chinese American and American Muslim physicians and scientists have any impact on Trump’s campaign rhetoric and the bigoted perceptions of his base? Probably not. To do so would require Trump voters to link the physicians’ backgrounds to the groups to which they belong and modify their attitudes accordingly — not an easy feat. Further, the president and his campaign operatives have too much invested in his crowd-pleasing rhetoric to change at this late date.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More