re: Census hypothetical: What if (D)’s were to add gun-related Q’s?

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I don't understand why asking whether you're a citizen or not would impact response rates. Even if there is some ulterior motive, the argument against it is asinine.

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There are a lot of people that refuse to do a number of mundane things because they're afraid the government is tracking them, despite not doing anything worthy of tracking in the first place.

So I could see how people could either not know, or not believe, that confidential information would be kept confidential. Or even then, I could see how they would be afraid that they would target areas that had a high number of non-citizens, even without any identifying information.

I think the citizen question could be useful, but at the same time, a more comprehensive and accurate census would be even more useful for that since we can pretty reliably determine how many citizens there are.