Reinforcing Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric

Less than a month before that Harvard computer scientist awkwardly defended his work on an automated gang crime system, President Donald Trump delivered his first State of the Union address.

During the address, Trump fixated, as he had done many times during his campaign, on “gang crimes” committed by MS-13, a youth gang that operates in the United States and Central America. He asked Congress to “close the deadly loopholes that have allowed MS-13 and other criminal gangs to break into our country.”

But while MS-13 is a significant problem in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, the group’s U.S. presence is small, and it isn’t clear that its U.S.-based members are primarily immigrants.

Trump has repeatedly used the group to incite fear among his audience, exploiting a small number of gruesome crimes to drum up support for his sweeping anti-immigration policies. These policies have already produced chaotic travel bans, led to increased raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, and left DREAMers in legislative limbo.

By comparison, the 2020 U.S. decennial census seems far less sensational and an unlikely target for anti-immigrant sentiment.

A vital tool for government and democracy, the census determines how seats in the House of Representatives are distributed and how hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funds will be allocated to key public services.

Yet the census has always been a lightning rod for political interests, wrote the distinguished history professor Margo Anderson in her 1988 book, The American Census. “Issues of race and region, growth and decline, equity and justice, have been fought out in census politics over the centuries.”

The 2020 census is no exception. In late 2017, Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department wrote to the Census Bureau pushing for an additional question regarding citizenship, claiming it wants to aid in the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Numerous stakeholders, from civil rights groups to state attorneys general, have decried the request, rightfully pointing out that a citizenship question is likely to depress response rates among Latinx and other groups — especially given the current administration’s rhetoric and policies.

Despite the pushback — and despite the fact that adding a question to a survey instrument without thoroughly studying its possible impact is just plain bad science — Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross overruled Census Bureau officials in late March and confirmed that the citizenship question will be added. As a result, stakeholders fear the 2020 census will have fewer responses and therefore less representation from an already politically vulnerable group.

And this was the backdrop against which the Harvard researchers chose to present their work: fearmongering rhetoric, anti-immigrant policy, and increased targeting of marginalized communities by immigration and law enforcement. Through their choice of data, and framing the question in the way they did, they inadvertently lent support to the kind of harmful, anti-immigrant representations already damaging Latinx communities across the country.

Those choices are built on assumptions and prejudices about people, intimately weaving them into processes and results that reinforce biases and, worse, make them seem natural or given.

They might not actively endorse the current administration’s policies personally, but they’ve still made those ideas feel, as Galtung put it, “not wrong.”