Ranking Member Jordan Releases Report on Democrat Fear-Mongering About the Census Citizenship Question

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH), Ranking Member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, released a second staff report critical of Chairman Cummings’s partisan investigation into the Commerce Department’s reinstatement of a question related to citizenship on the 2020 Census. This report analyzes the history of the citizenship question and demonstrates that Democrats’ efforts to sow fear and controversy around its reinstatement are meant to score political points.

On April 2, 2019, Ranking Member Jordan released a first staff report about the citizenship question, showing how Democrats are attempting to interfere in ongoing litigation before the Supreme Court.

Read the full report here and the appendices to the report here.

Read the first report here.

• Collecting Citizenship information is not a new practice. Every decennial census from 1820 to 1950 asked about citizenship. A question related to citizenship appears annually on the American Community Survey. State and federal entities solicit and collect citizenship data for a variety of reasons, including employment and licensure. The collection of citizenship information during a population census is a common practice among countries.
• Democrats are fear-mongering about the citizenship question. Democrats are loudly protesting the reinstatement of the citizenship question on the 2020 Census knowing full well that similar citizenship information is solicited regularly at all levels of government. Citizenship information obtained by the Census Bureau cannot be used for immigration enforcement or any other law enforcement purpose. Despite Democrat hysteria about the citizenship question, policymakers at all levels of government use anonymized and aggregated citizenship data for legitimate reasons.