When Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced that a citizenship question would be added to the 2020 census, civil rights advocates loudly cried foul, declaring the question, which last appeared on Census forms in 1950, constituted surveillance of vulnerable communities. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia sued Ross to block the change, a case that was fast-tracked to the Supreme Court after a U.S. District Court judge ruled for the plaintiffs in January.
But Ross said the citizenship question, which had been requested by the Justice Department and hadn’t been tested for its potential impact on census response rates, would ensure an accurate count of the voting-age population and help enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act. “Different employers when they're looking at placing a site in a given location, they'll look at how many people do I have of the working age. How many people do I have of certain population segments?” Pierce told Yahoo News.
“The decennial census is the largest peacetime operation that the government carries out,” she said. “It’s a huge operation and the planning for that has to occur years in advance and that planning includes testing of the questions to make sure that people understand them and make sure that they understand what the impact of any additional question would be.”
Additionally, health care companies use the census data to understand the demographics of different U.S. populations and communities, which helps them decide where to place or relocate, for example, hospitals or health centers.