The article presents a model developed to estimate the undercount stemming from lowered response among sub-populations of 1 st and 2 nd generation Latino immigrants if a question on citizenship is included in Census 2020. The analysis is relevant to census efforts wherever socioeconomic and sociopolitical disparities result in differential census participation.

The model is referred to as a “cascade” model because it examines successive causes of undercount in the course of non-response follow-up (NRFU), partial household omission in “complex” households, and omission of low-visibility housing units from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Master Address File (MAF). The analysis also examines the likelihood of enumeration errors from the U.S. Census Bureau’s proposed reliance on administrative records for enumerating non-responding housing units.

The model incorporates data from an 8-county survey of Latino immigrants regarding their willingness to participate in Census 2020 if it includes a question on citizenship. It shows that systematic differences in the size of responding and non-responding households will undermine reliability of hot-deck imputation.

The conclusion is that adoption of inadequately-tested “modernized” census procedures exacerbates differential undercount of immigrant populations and contributes significantly to geographic disparities in the census count and erodes the reliability demographic profile of areas with higher-than-average concentrations of immigrants.