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Comment by 35997279 | Hacker News Reader

> it’s hard to forget that your home country saw you as a threat even while a child.

And it’s the inability to forget that kept a citizenship question off the 2020 census[0], a reminder of the long lasting impact the internment still has on the US.

[0]https://www.npr.org/2018/12/26/636107892/some-japanese-ameri...

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What does one have to do with the other? Japanese internment was racist because US citizens of one race were being treated differently than US citizens of a different race.

Now, maybe you believe that citizenship shouldn’t be a salient category for treating people differently, but that’s an entirely different argument that has nothing to do with internment.

It’s curious that the NPR article doesn’t take exception with the question on the census that’s actually related to internment, which is dividing up American citizens by race and ethnicity.

Internment started with forcing non-citizens to register with the state. The census question was essentially the same process, but on a national scale.

> There have been 23 decennial censuses since 1790. All but one between 1820 and 2000 asked at least some of the population about their citizenship or place of birth. The question was asked of all households until 1950, and was asked of a fraction of the population on an alternative long-form questionnaire between 1960 and 2000. In 2010, the citizenship question was moved from the census to the American Community Survey, which is sent each year to a small sample of households.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-966_bq7c.pdf

That's not at all true. The citizenship question was removed from the 2020 Decennial Census by the Supreme Court in Department of Commerce v New York (2019) which held the Department of Commerce failed to provide a genuine justification for the decision to add the citizenship question (as required by the Administrative Procedure Act), instead providing a contrived and pretextual explanation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Commerce_v._New_...

That was the administrative reason why the question was not permitted. The case was raised to begin with because of fears it would result in undercounting non-citizens, who would be less likely to respond because the don’t trust that the data would remain private. This explanation is outlined in the section called “2020 Census” in the Wikipedia article you linked.

The article doesn't actually state the question, just links to a very large document that probably has it in there but I couldn't find it.

What was the question in particular?

page 11 of https://apps.npr.org/documents/document.html?id=4426784-Plan...

"Is this person a citizen of the United States?"

Thanks!

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