OPINION
Donald Trump backed down Wednesday (July 11) on his insistence to include the citizenship question on the 2020 Census. Hooray!
Instead, he issued an executive order mandating that federal agencies share their infomration with the Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census , in order to determine the number of noncitizens living in the US. He neglected to mention that this is information the Census regularly gathers and the agencies willingly share.
Trump didn't really want to know how many undocumented residents are living in the U.S. He probably knew this already.
Broken down by immigration status, the foreign-born Population includes 20.7 million naturalized U.S. citizens and 22.6 million noncitizens. Of the noncitizens, approximately 13.1 million are lawful permanent residents, 11.1 million are unauthorized migrants, and 1.7 million hold temporary visas. Heck, all he had to do was ask the Census Bureau this question. They have all that data. That's where I got the 10.5 million figure.
The Census Bureau told administration officials it can collect citizenship records from the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the State Department and US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
This is something the Census Bureau does regularly for other sets of data, such as economic surveys, the income-inequality gap, or the jobless rate among certain demographic groups.
He could also have asked the Pew Research Center, AAPI Data or any number of think tanks. They all base their conclusions on the data from the Census Bureau.
He could even have broken the figures down state to state and maybe even to region to region. The Census data analyzers could probably have figured out county to county, maybe even city to city.
What Trump was after was their addresses so his buddies in the state legislatures could figure out how to gerrymander districts that favor them. What some critics of the question feared was that his minions would use the information to deport individuals and/or families.
The fear of the misuse of that data is real. The Census, which asked the citizenship status of respondents, was used to round up Japanese Americans during World War II. No matter that it was totally illegal, leaders, including President Franklin Roosevelt, were drowning in war hysteria. When people are hysterical they tend to do stupid, and illegal things: Like round up people of a certain race and put them in concentration camps.
That's the same kind of hysteria Trump is stirring up in his anti-immigrant posturing and hateful statements about "sh-thold countries" and a Muslim-ban for foreign travelers. You keep feeding that ignorance, hate and fear and you get groups like the self-annointed private vigilante militia in their camo gear and AR-15s detaining anyone who looked like a border crosser; and white supremacist groups becoming more emboldened and stirring up the pot further their racist rhetoric.
Some people try to shrug that off as the action of a few fringe loonies. I call it Trump's 30%, his base, who would vote for him even if he shot someone in Times Square, which he once stated during his campaign. They would still vote for him because he's as off-balance as they are.
The problem is, like all bullies, when Trump doesn't get his way, he's likely to take his ire out on someone more vulnerable and unable to fight back. That's right! That's why we're having ICE raids starting Sunday. Picking on those least ability to fight back.
We have a crisis in this country but its not a border crisis. It's a mental crisis and the best example of that illness occupies the White House.
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