Atlanta-based anti-enforcement immigration group joins lawsuit to stop U.S. citizenship question on 2020 Census

By D.A. King, Insider Advantage Georgia, June 6, 2018

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Summary:

“The question will sow fear and confusion,” GALEO’s Jerry Gonzalez told the New York Times."

The Atlanta-based ‘GALEO’ Corp. has signed on as a plaintiff in a recently filed lawsuit against various federal officials, the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Census Bureau. The anti-enforcement immigration group has joined a long list of leftist plaintiffs that hope to overturn the U.S. Department of Commerce’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.

The lawsuit includes the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) as a plaintiff. MALDEF is widely known for a 1990’s on-air remark by its now deceased founder, Mario Obledo, who told radio talk-show host Tom Leikus “we’re going to take over all the political institutions in California. In five years the Hispanics are going to be the majority population of this state.” And “California is going to become a Hispanic state and if anyone doesn’t like it they should leave – they ought to go back to Europe.”

GALEO’s Executive Director, Jerry Gonzalez is a former MALDEF lobbyist, and the GALEO founder and original board chairman, former state senator Sam Zamarippa, is a former MALDEF board member. A complete list of the plaintiffs can be seen here.

A MALDEF press release posted on the corporate-funded GALEO website says “the decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census violates the U.S. Constitution because it is racially discriminatory and could result in a severe undercount of minorities”, according to a federal lawsuit filed by nearly two dozen groups and individuals.

Census questions on citizenship are not new

According to the left-leaning Pew Research Center “a citizenship question was asked in each decennial census of the total population from 1890 to 1950. (The 1820, 1830 and 1870 census questionnaires also included some form of a question about citizenship.)”

The U.S. Census Bureau has posted an explanation of the federal uses of the responses to questions regarding place of birth, citizenship and year of entry into the United States which include:

· Required in the enforcement responsibilities under the Voting Rights Act’s bilingual requirements, to determine eligible voting populations for analysis and for presentation in federal litigation.

· Required to enforce against discrimination in education, employment, voting, financial assistance, and housing.

· Used in many reporting and research tasks to investigate whether there are differences for citizens and foreign-born individuals in education, employment, home ownership, health, income and many other areas of interest to policymakers.

The Census Bureau also has posted a graphic that illustrates the change in the region of birth for immigrants comparing 1960 to 2010 which shows that the origin of immigration flows into the U.S. have changed from 75% being European to 53% Latin American in the fifty years between the two Census.

“The question will sow fear and confusion,” GALEO’s Jerry Gonzalez told the New York Times.

D.A. King is president of the Georgia-based Dustin Inman Society

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