Indians and Mexicans

Under the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, all Native people born in the U.S. were considered citizens of the U.S.  The 14th Amendment, of course, had declared all people who were born in the U.S. to be American citizens, but until 1924, this hadn’t applied to American Indians.  

In 1930 the powers that be decided that Mexicans who entered the U.S. illegally might try to pass themselves off as Indians.  To prevent that, the 1930 census introduced as a race the term “Mexicans.”  Then, in 1940, the Census Bureau decided that Mexicans were “White” and should listed as such, so the category of Mexicans disappeared.  

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, a man who had helped Trump with his various bankruptcies, tried to include a question about citizenship in this year’s census.  (The Census Bureau is located in the Commerce Department.)  This would have depressed the count in heavily Latino areas, reducing the representation of those areas in Congress.  The courts prevented this, but you can see why various groups might be suspicious of census takers.  

The info on past census questions is from Jill Lepore, “But Who’s Counting,” New Yorker, (March 23, 2020), pp. 10-16.