Tucker Carlson says the citizenship question has nothing to do with race. The architect of the question disagreed.

Written by Madeline Peltz

Published

On July 9, Fox host Tucker Carlson opened his show with a monologue addressing the citizenship question on the upcoming 2020 U.S. census as the Trump administration scraps together a last-minute effort to go forward with its plan. Carlson claimed that the Democrats’ objections are “entirely fake, like most of their temper tantrums” and that “there is nothing racial about a citizenship question.”

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): There is nothing inherently weird or controversial about asking if someone’s a citizen of a country. Every nation has a right to know that. 

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It’s utterly absurd, of course, but it’s also entirely fake like most of their temper tantrums. “Do what I want or I’ll call you a racist!” That’s always their threat. How long will people fall for it? How long will Republicans in Congress be intimidated by it? There is nothing racial about a citizenship question, obviously. A question like that would apply to everyone, whether they’re Honduran or Norweigan or Congolese or Korean. It doesn’t matter; it’s literally colorblind. Not that the Democrats care. The Democratic Party is not interested in stopping racism. What they want is power.

Carlson’s analysis completely ignores documents from deceased Republican operative Thomas B. Hofeller, who pioneered modern methods of gerrymandering and pushed the Trump transition team to add citizenship status to the census. The files show that the question was intentionally crafted to advantage non-Hispanic whites and the Republican Party. According to The New York Times, “Mr. Hofeller’s exhaustive analysis of Texas state legislative districts concluded that such maps ‘would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites’ and would dilute the political power of the state’s Hispanics.” The report explains that Hofeller’s research shows “the maps would exclude traditionally Democratic Hispanics and their children from the population count.” The citizenship question would deliberately exclude traditionally Democratic constituencies purely on racial lines, which Carlson ignored.