We begin today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson and his take on the president’s border policies:
The Trump administration has manufactured and exacerbated an immigration “crisis” to further the president’s most consistent goal: to Make America White Again.
Tens of thousands of Central American asylum seekers, even hundreds of thousands, do not constitute a serious crisis — not for a continent-spanning nation of 330 million, a nation built through successive waves of immigration. The migrants have severely taxed and at times overwhelmed the systems at the border that must process and adjudicate their claims for refuge, but this is a simple matter of resources. We need more border agents, more immigration judges, more housing.
President Trump, however, treats the migrant surge like an existential threat. “We can’t take you anymore. We can’t take you. Our country is full,” he said this month at the border in California. But, of course, our vast nation is anything but full. Instead of “can’t,” what Trump really means is “won’t.”
Catherine Rampell points out that including a citizenship question on the 2020 Census only makes the data less reliable:
The Trump administration wants to add, at the last minute, a new question to the census. I say “last minute” because usually new survey questions go through years of research, field-testing and public comment, as required by law and federal regulations.
This is to make sure that, among other things, any changes will not disrupt the accuracy of an enumeration mandated by the Constitution. [...]
The question the administration wants to shoehorn in without this process turns out to be particularly disruptive: It asks about citizenship. Given rising levels of government distrust among immigrant and ethnic minority populations, the question could be reasonably expected to depress response rates among these groups and lead to significant undercounts or otherwise inaccurate data.