By Doug Miller

“The immigrant community already feels like it’s in the cross hairs. The Vitter Amendment is the sharpshooter.”

–Angela Kelly, Center for American Progress

Opposition to an eleventh-hour change in a Census Bureau funding bill is building. Minority legislators and a widening array of civil rights advocacy groups have voiced concerns that a proposed amendment by U.S. Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Robert Bennett (R-UT) will have a chilling effect on Census participation and unnecessarily add hundreds of millions of dollars to the process.

The Vitter-Bennett Amendment, number 2644, to the Commerce-Justice and Science Appropriations Bill, now pending in the Senate, would add an eleventh question to the constitutionally mandated 10-year population survey, asking whether respondents are U.S. citizens. Previously, the census had included no such query.

Vitter recently told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that when it comes time for reapportionment, which relies on census figures, counting noncitizens could boost congressional representation for states with high numbers of illegal immigrants, and penalize states like Louisiana that have fewer illegal immigrants.

Besides reapportionment, the census is used to allot some $400 billion in federal funds to state, local and tribal governments every year, and to help make decisions about the provision of services to specific communities.

As reported by Newsmax.com, Vitter claims illegal immigrants counted in the 2000 census may have given California up to five additional seats in Congress. Based on a decrease in population, Louisiana may stand to lose one of its seven seats in the House of Representatives after the 2010 census.

“I don’t think states which have particularly large noncitizen populations should have more say and more clout in Congress,” Vitter has said. “The bottom line is that average Americans think it’s outrageous for illegals to be counted in congressional reapportionment.”

But an increasing number of congressional leaders and advocacy groups say the real outrage is in Vitter’s disguised purpose. “The Vitter-Bennett proposal is a coldly political maneuver to discourage participation (by) minorities,” according to Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), “while completely disregarding the immense negative impact that this racially and culturally insensitive amendment would have on the administration of our national Census.”

Lee, who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, joined a cadre of federal legislators recently to condemn the amendment, declaring the issue should be about ensuring an accurate census count, not scare tactics that “will only serve to skew the census data, driving people not to participate.”

Kristen Clarke, co-director of the Political Participation Project with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), said the Vitter amendment, which seeks to strip Census Bureau funding unless the survey is revised to include the question about citizenship, “would have a predictable and clear chilling effect on Census participation by discouraging full participation among many of the same potential Census respondents who have been missed in prior Census counts.” The bureau itself, she noted, has conceded the probability that upwards of a million black U.S. residents may have been excluded from earlier surveys.

Because of its potential to discourage open participation in the population count, Clarke added, the legislation poses a “substantial threat to LDF’s efforts to achieve a full and accurate count of all persons in 2010.”

In a joint conference call that included representatives from several advocacy organizations, Clarke noted that the Census process is confidential, and the information gained from it is not to be shared for any purpose other than a head count. It most definitely is not intended to be used for law enforcement.

During that same conference call, Angela Kelly, vice president for Immigration Policy and Advocacy with the Center for American Progress, agreed that the proposed amendment likely would cause undocumented residents to avoid participating in the census out of fear.

“The immigrant community already feels like it’s in the crosshairs,” she declared. “The Vitter amendment is the sharpshooter.” Kelley called the bill impractical, unconstitutional, and “clearly politically-driven.”

Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the New Democratic Network (NDN), a think tank and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., concurred. “Their [Vitter’s and Bennett’s] intent is not to get a more accurate count. The goal is to actually go after [undocumented residents], so of course it will contribute to a climate of distrust and fear.”

Much of the illegal immigration debate in the United States revolves around the influx of undocumented Mexicans and Latin Americans into the country, prompting Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Education Fund, to frame the census issue from the standpoint of Latin Americans. “Latinos are the nation’s second-largest and fastest-growing population group,” he was quoted as saying on NDN’s website, “and the 2010 Census cannot be successful without the full participation of every single Latino resident. The Vitter-Bennett amendment is a deliberate attempt to suppress the Latino count, and it will jeopardize the accuracy of the most important source of data about our nation’s population.”

Charlie Gonzalez, First Vice Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a House Democrat from Texas, maintained it is also a dollars-and-cents issue. “Implementing the Vitter amendment would cost up to $1 billion and undermine the results of the entire census,” he noted at a recent Capital news conference. “It could even prevent the Department of Commerce from meeting its statutory deadlines for completing the process. Members of Congress reviewed the [existing census] questions 18 months ago, and the timing of this amendment makes clear the political motivations behind it.”

During the same news conference, Missouri Congressman Lacy Clay indicated a photo showing a warehouse where 425 million census questionnaires are being stored, to be mailed in the spring to American homes. “You have a warehouse stacked with forms seven stories high,” Clay said, “that Mr. Vitter and Mr. Bennett apparently want destroyed, and reprinted. It’s a waste, it’s inefficient, it’s certainly not something we should consider doing.”

Doug Miller is a writer living in Westchester County, New York.