Population Politics

Suppose for a moment that you were an illegal immigrant or, for that matter, a legal immigrant with family members who are undocumented and so you're unnerved by what you perceived as a climate of immigrant-bashing fueled in part by an aggressive crackdown by federal immigration authorities.

There's a knock at the door. It's a census taker, whose job it is to ask you questions about who lives at this address. And, according to the policy of the U.S. Census Bureau, he is supposed to count illegal immigrants along with everyone else. That's because cities and states rely on a complete count to demand their share of government funding. But, given the unfriendly climate, the first question you have to answer is this: Do you answer the door?

Many activists insist the answer should be "no." And they specifically blame work site raids, carried out first by the Bush administration and now by the Obama administration, for making immigrants afraid. So, for several months they've been lobbying the Census Bureau to do something that the bureau did during the last national head count in 2000 — ask immigration officials to suspend the raids long enough to carry out the census.

Last week, with six months left until the April launch of the national count, census officials announced that they would not be asking the Department of Homeland Security for a moratorium on work site raids. Clearly, this was a case of one government agency standing up to pressure and refusing to tell another one how to conduct its affairs.

Kudos.

This was the right decision. Political correctness aside, this is a line that should never have been crossed in the first place. So we can consider this a much-needed correction in policy.

Not only are immigration raids a necessary and legitimate tool for the government to use as it tackles the Herculean task of trying to curb illegal immigration. They are also not linked to the census in any way whatsoever. Federal officials aren't raiding homes, after all. They're raiding businesses in search of illegal immigrants. How would that kind of activity make people afraid to answer the door at home? If anything, shouldn't it make them afraid to go to work? Moreover, wouldn't this fear mostly be present among illegal immigrants?

Besides, it's clear that the argument that immigrants won't participate in the census count is just a convenient tool for those who oppose raids anyway, and who are looking for any excuse to stop them. For those who think that these operations are unnecessarily punitive because they sometimes split up families, the problem isn't that people living in the United States might go into hiding and not be counted by the census. For this crowd, the much bigger problem is the fact that the raids are even happening. That's what they want to put an end to, any way they can. And this latest controversy is just a smokescreen that they hope will help them do that.

The immigration raids should continue. So should the census. Both of these government efforts serve important purposes, and neither need interfere with the other.

REPRINTED FROM THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER.

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