Trump Eyes Immigration Question for 2030 Census as New York Weighs What’s at Stake

America’s next national census is already stoking political fires over who counts as a New Yorker—and who counts at all.

In 2030, the United States will once again enumerate its people, a constitutionally mandated rite that shapes the flow of money and power for a decade. Yet, six years out, census-taking has returned to the centre of acrimonious national debate—especially in New York City, where the matter is both existential and economic. The immediate controversy concerns a Trump-backed effort to revive a question about immigration status, a query that could, if included, transform the picture the nation paints of itself.

On August 2023, Donald Trump declared via his social network, Truth Social, that “The people who are in our Country illegally will NOT be counted in the Census.” It was a provocative reprise: the former president had tried (and failed) to insert a citizenship question in the 2020 census, before federal courts deemed the attempt unlawful under both statute and constitutional amendment. Still, the issue refuses to die. This year, the Census Bureau is preparing a pilot survey, slated from April to September, that will trial such a question across 150,000 households in Alabama and South Carolina—bellwethers for a possible shift in 2030.

Why should New Yorkers fret over faraway surveys? The resonance is immediate. Census data determine the allocation of over $1.5 trillion in annual federal spending, from Medicaid dollars and school lunches to infrastructure and emergency services. For a city with more than three million foreign-born residents—roughly one in three New Yorkers—undercounts are not academic nuisances but threats to livelihoods.

Nor is the fuss only about money. Apportionment of Congressional seats, the drawing of state and city legislative districts, and the number of electoral-college votes each state wields all depend on population tallies. If millions of immigrants are left out—because they mistrust census-takers, avoid being counted, or are explicitly excised by political diktat—New York and other immigrant-rich states stand to lose representation just as their needs multiply. The spectre of an “undercount” is hardly hypothetical: in 2020, the Census Bureau estimated hundreds of thousands were missed in New York alone.

The motives for hostility towards immigrants in the census are plain enough. Excluding undocumented people from population totals would reduce the Congressional clout of states such as New York, California, and Texas (yes, even the Lone Star State), all home to outsized foreign-born populations. The iron law: where numbers shrink, so does influence. Less obvious—but equally pernicious—are the ripple effects. Fearful respondents, convinced that census data might be leaked to immigration-enforcement agencies, could avoid participation altogether, leaving even legal residents and citizens undercounted in mixed-status households.

The economic costs boggle. A single-digit drop in counted population might translate to hundreds of millions in lost funding for health clinics, schools, and transit—services crucial both to new arrivals and the native-born alike. For New York City, already grappling with ballooning asylum-seeker arrivals and puny state and federal aid, such a blow would be felt across every borough. Businesses, too, suffer; demographic data from the census underpins investment decisions, retail expansion, and even emergency response planning.

The rest of America watches, and weighs its own stake

The census has always been both a mirror and a battleground. In the early 20th century, urban political machines fought to pad city counts, while rural states sought to pare them down. More recently, Australia scrapped its own planned citizenship question over fears of non-response; in Canada, Ottawa reversed a costly experiment with a voluntary census after data quality plummeted. The American drama is distinct in its scale and stakes, but not in its tension between data purity and political gamesmanship.

Legal argument, at least until now, has rested on the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires apportionment based on “the whole number of persons in each state.” The Supreme Court, in Department of Commerce v. New York (2019), found that inserting a citizenship question would likely depress participation and thus violate that constitutional directive. Yet, laws are only as robust as the will to enforce them—and executive agencies, like the Census Bureau, do not operate in a vacuum, especially when their political masters wish otherwise.

Will a more politicised census portend a less accurate, more fractious portrait of America? Data wags at the city’s Department of City Planning reckon that the threat is real. Echoes of the 2020 attempted question have not faded; indeed, they have become a playbook. The spectre of ICE raids, amplified online, has already made some immigrant communities reticent to open their doors, and trial runs in Southern states seem explicitly designed to test where intimidation might yield depressed turnout.

New Yorkers are not strangers to such tactics. In 2010 and 2020 alike, City Hall launched linguistic outreach, park-based canvassing, and community partnerships to allay suspicion and boost response rates. They were only partially successful. In a city as variegated as Queens or the South Bronx, even minor upticks in fear can dent response rates—often not noticed until dollars dry up.

Globally, the tension between state power and social trust in census-taking is far from new. But few countries see the matter so fiercely politicised at a municipal level. New York’s experience, both as a magnet for migrants and a perennial budget battleground, offers a warning. Census distortion risks hardening the divides that today menace American politics—while eroding the common fund which even the most nativist voices find hard to renounce when disaster strikes.

The longer-term lesson seems straightforward. If New York’s millions are miscounted, it is not merely a local concern. The nation’s image—of itself, and to the world—is at stake. Vibrant, teeming cities count precisely because everyone is counted. Paring down the census to suit partisan taste bodes ill not just for federal arithmetic, but for American aspirations.

A politicised census may ultimately yield data as unreliable as the assumptions behind it, thwarting the very rationale for enumeration in the first place. To be governed smartly, cities—and nations—require numbers unmarred by scaremongering. New York must prepare now, not just for its own sake, but for the broader American project. The census, after all, is not merely a headcount. It is a declaration of who is seen, and whose presence powers the republic. ■