A History of the Census Bureau's Birthplace and Citizenship Questions in One Table
By Jason Richwine on June 8, 2018
The Trump administration recently restored a citizenship question to the full decennial census, starting with the year 2020. When critics charged that the new question may reduce response rates, some confusion ensued as to when and how the Census Bureau has asked about citizenship in the past. The following table gives the history of both the citizenship and birthplace questions.
https://cis.org/Richwine/History-Census-Bureaus-Birthplace-and-Citizenship-Questions-One-TableTraditionally, Census questionnaires have asked only for basic demographic information, since burdening everyone with a long set of questions would cost too much time and money. In the mid-twentieth century, the Census Bureau devised a way to obtain more detailed data in a cost-effective manner. It added supplemental questions — the "long form" — that would be answered by a representative subset of the population. After 1950, both the birthplace and the citizenship questions were removed from the full census and demoted to the long form. The birthplace question moved to the long form in 1960, while the citizenship question began appearing on the long form in 1970.
