Issues & Insights
Census Bureau citizenship question under Clinton

Trump’s Citizenship Question Is Racist? What About Clinton’s and Obama’s?

The debate over the Trump Administration’s proposed citizenship question  on the 2020 Census is heating up again. A federal judge in New York held a hearing on this question this week, and the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on this matter by month’s end.

The Right seems tongue-tied on this issue amid the Left’s predictable and vile claims that this question is fueled by — what else? — racism.

Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said the citizenship question is “nothing more than a pretext to carry out the Trump Administration’s racist agenda.”

The Daily Kos Liberation League screams: “We must keep up the fight to block this racist, anti-immigrant question from the census.” 

The fastest way to humiliate the Left into silence on this matter is to display the images of the 2000 Census, in which Bill Clinton asked the very same question. “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” 

Clinton and Obama Citizenship Questions

While Obama did not ask this question on the 2010 Census, he did ask it on all eight of the smaller-sample American Community Surveys that his Census Bureau administered annually across his entire reign of error. In fact, Obama asked this question in English and Spanish

If posing this question in Spanish truly sends Hispanics, legal and otherwise, diving under their beds, why did Barack Hussein Diversity ask this question in Spanish — eight times?

If one combines Clinton’s 2000 Census and all eight of Obama’s American Community Surveys — in English and Spanish — then these two liberal Democrats asked people if they are citizens seventeen times!

So, the Left immediately should drop their despicable lies about this question being Donald J. Trump’s brand-new, bigoted invention. Clinton and Obama got there before he did and asked this question again and again and again and again. In fact, this was a standard query on Census forms from 1820 to 2000.

Conservatives, Republicans, honest Democrats, and those who simply want an accurate tally of U.S. citizens and foreign citizens in America should make maximum noise about this issue. They should circulate, post, share, televise, duplicate, diffuse, and otherwise make famous the nearby images of these citizenship questions taken directly from the Census Bureau’s website.

If properly distributed — as the Administration and its allies largely have failed to do — this indisputable visual evidence of the Left’s rampant hypocrisy on this matter should make their “citizenship question = Trump racism” narrative collapse more quickly than a soufflé in an earthquake.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.


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2 comments

  • Questions on Citizenship are “racist” . . . that is patently Insane . . .
    What is also insane is allowing many Millions of Illegal Aliens from all over the World trample through your country . . .

  •   The primary purpose of the census, as required by the Constitution, is to count citizens fcr the purpose of allocating representation in the House of Representatives, and in the Electoral college.  Only citizens should be counted for this purpose, as non-citizens are not entitled to any such representation, and to include them in the count used for this purpose has the effect of diluting the representation of citizens.

      It has been credibly estimated that California has an additional nine Congresspersons, and an additional nine Electoral votes, because of non-citizens—including illegal aliens—being included in the last census count.  This has the effect of cancelling out the representation of our three smallest states.

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