Leaders indicate that the directive does not exclude undocumented immigrants from the count

by Pilar Marrero

All communities, regardless of citizenship status, need to respond to the U.S. Census inspite of President Trump’s July 21 policy memo on reapportionment, civil rights advocates and census experts urged in an ethnic media conference call on July 24.

The memo, issued July 21, instructs the Commerce Department to eliminate undocumented immigrants from census data used for reapportioning Congressional Districts for the next decade.

“One thing to make clear is that the President is not asking for undocumented immigrants to be excluded in the Census. A great deal of media coverage suggests that those immigrants will not be counted, and that is not what the policy memo is asking for,” said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association for Latino Elected Officials (NALEO).

The Trump Administration asserts it intends to use “administrative data” from other departments to calculate the number of undocumented immigrants in the Census final count, and calculate population numbers for the purposes of reappoprtionment without them.

Public interest lawyers have said that this policy memo is unconstitutional, and three separate lawsuits have been filed in federal courts to challenge it. States with large immigrant populations could lose Congressional seats.

Vargas warned that excluding “undocumented immigrants” after the Census is finalized amounts to “nothing more than cooking the numbers, or making up an entirely new data set on which to base the most important element of our democracy”.

Vargas and other experts say that the federal government´s data will be “very imprecise,” in part because the 2020 Census does not contain any question regarding citizenship or immigration status and because the data collected by other federal departments is generally inaccurate.

According to a new report by the Migration Policy Institute, the process the Administration proposes could incorrectly “lump together” as many as 20 million U.S. citizens with unauthorized immigrants due to matching errors. “Such errors are likely to be greater in low-income urban and rural communities, thereby exacerbating any undercount that may occur in those communities and reducing their voting power relative to more affluent communities,” the MPI report noted.

The goal of community organizations regarding the Census has not changed in spite of the memo, said John C. Yang, President and Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ).

“There is no immigration status question whatsoever in the Census and we encourage people to respond online, on paper or by telephone, especially if they don´t want an enumerator to knock on their door,” Yang said. “And I remind them that the deadline for responding is still October 31.”

Yang, who is also an attorney, reiterated that “Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution makes clear that apportionment is based on all persons in the United States,” and makes no distinction between citizens and persons.

“The suggestion that somehow undocumented immigrants are not people or persons just flies in the face of logic, legislative history and policy of the United States for several hundred years,” Yang added.

Nevertheless, the memo has deepened uncertainty and fear which will further inhibit many communities from responding to the Census, especially those in Florida and Texas which have provided no state funds for census outreach.

“We are still having to address the fear of the citizenship question that was pushed by the Administration early on,” said Nestor López, a census organizer from the Texas border county of Hidalgo.

The challenges in Hidalgo County are compounded by a persistent undercount of the area for at least the last two decades, the lack of internet connectivity in many of its communities and the pandemic, which crushed plans for person-to-person interaction, Lopez added.

He and other activists have had to switch strategies from in-person activities to online outreach and rely on local voices and celebrities “to share our message.”

Data based on response rates by geographic area show that minority and poor regions consistently show lower response rates to date, but Native American nations are particularly challenging, said Kayla Olvera Hilario, Tribal Affairs Specialist of the California Complete Count-Census 2020.

“Our numbers are pretty low across the state,” said Hilario. “We have some tribes at 60 percent self-response and a lot of tribes hovering around 20 to 30% response rates. About 20 tribes are under 15 percent response. The positive thing is that our response rates are greater than they were in 2010.”

California’s response rate so far is 63.8 percent and this year, the state has invested at least 2 million dollars in specific outreach towards counting tribal populations in the state.

The tribal specialist pointed to the fact that many households have not received a unique Census I.D., which wasn´t required in the general population, to use when responding to the questionnaire.

“Tribes were instructed to wait for the unique identifier,“ she said. “Some of those tribes to this day have not received those packets with the identifiers which is causing a huge challenge”.

Many tribes have also declared a state of emergency which does not allow for the entrance of enumerators to their areas. Hilario pointed out that the most effective way to get Native Americans to participate is to reinforce the appeal of the Census as a way to strengthen sovereignty.

Marilyn Stephens, Assistant Regional Manager for the Southern District of the U.S. Census, highlighted precautions the Bureau is taking as enumerators begin knocking on doors for the next phase of the census. “Staff has been issued masks, sanitizer and clear instructions and training, they cannot enter a home, they must practice social distancing.” But, she noted, “people can still avoid the visit by self-responding now”.

The specialist uses a simple message to encourage communities to participate: “The only message that I tell people is this: It takes less than 10 minutes to fill out the Census and it guarantees 10 years of services and representation. Everyone must be counted”.

For Mexican workers, farmers, and the poor, the pandemic and the new treaty replacing NAFTA are a devastating one-two punch

by David Bacon

In the debate over the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement, the new trade treaty replacing NAFTA that went into effect on July 1, many promises were made about the effectiveness of its labor protections.  Supposedly, they will protect the labor rights of Mexican workers, which will free them to push for better wages and conditions.

These promises are reminiscent of those made when the original NAFTA was debated over a quarter of a century ago. At the time, its corporate backers insisted it would lead to prosperity for workers and farmers, who would no longer be obligated to leave home to find work in the United States.

Whether the old treaty created better conditions-for workers in the maquiladora factories on the border, for Mexican migrants toiling in U.S. fields, or for farmers in the communities from which the migrants come-is more than an economic issue. In the era of the pandemic, the record of the old treaty must be examined to determine as well its responsibility for life and death. Did the changes it provoked make Mexicans more vulnerable to the virus? And because it continues the same economic regime, the new agreement cannot avoid raising the same questions.

The impact on Mexico

NAFTA had a devastating impact on Mexican workers, farmers, and the poor, and its labor and environmental side agreements did nothing to protect them. The problem lies in the agreement’s purpose-to facilitate the penetration of U.S. capital in Mexico. By taking down barriers to investment and the activity of U.S. corporations, it instituted cataclysmic political and economic changes. The current trade agreement shares NAFTA’s purpose and will have the same impact.

The 1990 report by the U.S. Congress’ Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development recommended that the United States negotiate a free trade agreement with Mexico in order to deter migration. But even this report warned, “It takes many years-even generations-for sustained growth to achieve the desired effect,” and in the meantime would create years of “transitional costs in human suffering.”

Waves of privatization, mandated to provide opportunities for banks and investors, cost the jobs of hundreds of thousands as Mexico threw open its economy. As investment increased, the income of Mexicans declined.

Investment had health consequences beyond unemployment. The prelude to COVID came in 2009, with the spread of the H1N1 virus, or swine flu. In Mexico some call it the NAFTA flu, because the agreement provided the vehicle for Smithfield Foods to fill the Perote Valley in Puebla with hog farms. The virus started in a valley town, La Gloria.  Its source was the intense concentration of pigs and their waste. The waste from Smithfield’s U.S. operations was so considerable it led to prohibitions even by the conservative government of North Carolina.

The failure of NAFTA’s labor side agreement was even more complete. Not a single independent union won bargaining rights, nor a single fired worker reinstated, because of a NAFTA complaint. That abysmal record continues today. The Mexican miners union has been on strike at the huge Cananea copper mine since 2007. The treaty had no impact on regaining their rights. Instead, NAFTA’s freeing of investment to move across borders helped the mine’s owner. The wealthy Larrea family bought the ASARCO mines in Arizona, and forced the miners’ cross-border allies, the United Steel Workers, out on strike there as well. NAFTA’s goal of freeing investment didn’t guarantee labor rights; it jeopardized them. The new agreement has precisely the same goal.

AMLO’s response

One of the first acts by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) after he was inaugurated president in December 2018 was to mandate the doubling of wages in the border factories. In Matamoros, tens of thousands of workers went on strike after their U.S. employers and Mexican partners simply refused to obey the law. The government, however, seemed afraid to use its considerable power to force maquiladora employers to comply.

When the COVID-19 crisis started, the Mexican government ordered U.S.-owned factories to stop production, many of them auto assemblers and plants in the Pentagon’s supply chain. Again, companies simply refused to comply until their own workers went on strike and forced them to close the doors. At least twelve people died in the Lear auto parts plant alone. Then the U.S. ambassador, the State Department, and the executives of big U.S. defense and auto corporations leaned on the government in Mexico City. AMLO folded under the pressure and allowed them to restart production, even though workers will get sick and die as a result.

The leverage that the agreements have given the United States is very disturbing. The growth of U.S. production in Mexico has made the Mexican government dependent on keeping that sector operating. This doesn’t just affect the past governments that were notoriously pro-corporate. Mexicans elected AMLO because he promised to end this neoliberal dependence and make life in Mexico more attractive for Mexicans. But the U.S. government and companies have been able to use their leverage to pressure him to reverse those promises. Trump threatened to shut the border and forced Mexico to agree to illegally keep applicants for asylum, including women and children, in camps. NAFTA provided no means to stop Trump from doing this, and the new treaty won’t do that either.

Now this popularly elected president is going to Washington to greet Trump before the election, hat in hand, desperate to see this new trade agreement implemented. But signing the new treaty and a White House visit are not creating friendship with Mexico.

(Due to lack of space, this article was cut).