BOSTON – U.S. Census Bureau proposals would exclude a large noncitizen population in Massachusetts, change whether the state’s “snowbird” population is counted, and cause “severe inaccuracies” in population data in 2030, a local research expert told lawmakers Wednesday.
One lawmaker said the thought of the impact that would have on the state was “flabbergasting.”
The bureau in September proposed changes to the regulations governing the decennial census, including only counting U.S. citizens and green card holders, setting a three-month “enumeration period,” and proving residence through tax records. The public comment period for the proposed regulations opened Sept. 10 and was extended to Nov. 2.
“Imagine losing 641,000 people from the census count,” said Susan Strate, senior program manager of the Population Estimates Program and Massachusetts State Data Center at the UMass Donahue Institute. The decennial count is used to determine a state’s representation in Congress and determines some levels of federal funding.
About one in five, or 1.3 million, residents in Massachusetts are foreign born, Strate said, over 641,000 of whom are noncitizens, representing about 9% of the state’s total population. Missing that many people would be about equivalent to losing the populations of Worcester, Springfield, Cambridge, Lowell and Melrose combined, she said, or just not counting the city of Boston in the census.
Of the around 641,000 noncitizens, Strate suggested at a Senate Committee on the Census hearing that 75,000 to 100,000 are green card holders who would be counted under the proposed regulations.
“That’s still more than half a million people,” Sen. Becca Rausch commented. Metropolitan Area Planning Council Director of Data Services Jessie Partridge Guerrero later said her conservative estimate suggested about half that number, a quarter of a million people, would be excluded due to noncitizen exclusion.
The census sets the population base for the next 10 years and “is about data, money and power,” Strate said. “If you remove noncitizens from our count, you’re looking at a loss of over $1.5 billion per year in federal funds.” There could be inaccuracies across counts including the American Community Survey, 2031 through 2039 annual estimates, employment rates and health care statistics, she added.
The census also determines representation; due to a population slowdown in the 2010 Census, Massachusetts lost a Congressional seat.
There would be “a sea change” in the way residence criteria is applied, Massive Data Institute Senior Fellow Beth Jarosz said. The criteria are rules that determine where people are counted during a census based on the concept of “usual residence,” Jarosz explained, criteria important for people traveling on Census Day on April 1, people with multiple homes, college students and transient populations.
The proposal would create an enumeration period between Jan. 3 and April 1, revising the definition of “usual residency” to be where a person has spent the most time during that period.
The change “will dramatically and inaccurately favor southern states where many northern residents, sometimes called snowbirds, spend some or all of the months of December through March, despite spending a majority of their time voting in and paying taxes to northern states like Massachusetts,” Guerrero said.
Rausch called it “flabbergasting to think of the impact that this could have.”
The Census Bureau wrote that the proposals “are intended to ensure fidelity to the Constitution, improve and protect the core decennial census data, and promote efficiency.”
“Under the best reading of the Constitutional mandate, illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, as they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ‘usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States,” the bureau wrote in its proposed resident criteria.
Another proposed census regulation would prohibit demographic questions about race and ethnicity or sexual orientation on the decennial census, which experts did not extensively discuss Wednesday.
Committee Chair Sen. Will Brownsberger said Wednesday he believes there will be litigation if the regulations were to be adopted. Rausch added: “I personally fear that the ramifications and the impact of these kinds of changes, assuming they go through, are going to be felt long before we get a decision from SCOTUS.”