Tom Sgouros: Short Takes

Tom Sgouros: Short Takes

One congressman preserved by... who?

Voting districts are in the news, and David Cicilline and Jim Langevin tussle about who has to put up with Burrillville, but have you stopped to wonder why Rhode Island still has two representatives?

Rhode Island gained only about ten thousand people between the 2000 and 2010 Census, much fewer than many other states. But we held onto our second district, barely.

The number of congressional representatives grew throughout the first century or so of our nation's history, but has been essentially frozen at 435 since 1912. The way the districts are apportioned now is a little complicated. First, each state get one. After that, the Census ranks the states by a formula that depends on the population and the proposed number of representatives. California's second representative is at the top of this list, then the second one for Texas then California's third, New York's second, Florida's second, and so on down the list until number 435. 

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So where is Rhode Island's second representative? At number 419, just ahead of Florida's 26th. Minnesota's eighth representative just barely makes the list, at 435, and Montana's second is at 440, so they don't get one. If we had 50,828 fewer people, we'd have been at 436, and lost out ourselves.

What's interesting about this is where those people have come from. After all, our population is not declining, but it's not growing much, and it's changing a lot, too. According to the Census, the white population of the state went down 34,402 people between 2000 and 2010. But this was made up by an increase in the Latino population of 39,835. Latinos are now 12.4% of the population here. The black and Asian populations also increased substantially. Without the Latino growth, Rhode Island would have been 430th on the list, and without the black population growth we'd have been at 438, and David Cicilline and Jim Langevin wouldn't be arguing over district boundaries, they'd be running against each other.

Why is this important? During the preparation for the Census last year, you might remember the Republican and Fox screeching about how the Census was preparing to use statistical sampling to improve the count in poor neighborhoods. Few people who haven't tried to do it acknowledge how hard it is to count things that move. Counting as many people as there are even in a small town is not as simple as knocking on every door. If you knock on a door in March and meet an eight-and-a-half months pregnant woman, is that one person or two for a Census that's supposed to be accurate as of April 1? What if you meet someone under hospice care? What do you do if no one is home all five times you go, but the lawn is trimmed and there's a car in the driveway?

Even beyond these problems, any responsible count has to assess whether people are double-counted, like a child who splits her time between divorced parents, or a family that moves during the count. And you also have to worry about whether to believe the responses. (And you have the occasional monkey-wrench, like the misguided latino movement to boycott the Census in 2010.)

The Census Bureau runs the "American Community Survey" every five years, and that survey doesn't knock on nearly as many doors, but it does deal with these issues. But the Census has been forbidden from taking them into account in a rigorous way for the decennial census by Republicans in Congress. This means that the hard-to-count populations, i.e. the poor and urban ones, are undercounted. Since this predominantly means the black and latino populations of our nation, those groups are almost certainly among the undercounted.

The Republicans who insist the Census be a simple count are essentially insisting it be inaccurate, since they see themselves as the beneficiaries of undercounted poor communities. They are probably right: we kept our second representative through growth in the undercounted minority communities. Had we lost one, North Carolina or Missouri would have been the beneficiary.

Detaining citizens without due process

No, this isn't about the astonishing abuse to the fourth amendment passed by Congress as part of the defense appropriation bill. Obama promised to veto it a couple of weeks ago, but apparently he didn't mean it.

But I'm not talking about detaining citizens because they are associated with terrorism, I'm talking about detaining citizens because they look like Mexicans.

An appalling story at MSNBC reported that a couple of American citizens have been held in immigrationi jails for a couple of days. The article contained the stories of two people who had been held for a few days before they were able to persuade immigration officials they were citizens. (Do you travel with your birth certificate in your pocket?)

A few days is bad enough, but buried in the article was this gem:

82 people who were held for deportation from 2006 to 2008 at two immigration detention centers in Arizona, for periods as long as a year, were freed after immigration judges determined that they were American citizens.

War Over

So read the headline in the Providence Journal yesterday. My question: for whom?

Tom Sgouros is the editor of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter, at whatcheer.net and the author of "Ten Things You Don't Know About Rhode Island." Contact him at [email protected].