9-3-26 - 10am - The Census Bureau's Mistakes Have A Human Cost

0:00Why you deal with listening to Armstrong and getting on demand? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring. And tedious. And depressing. And makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. About something about a comedic tone. What? We have a winner? Yes. Listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Somewhere in the, anywhere in the country right now. In fact, I can think of several of them that I know personally. But let's just take a, the composite of them. There's a woman. She did everything right. Maybe you know her name. Maybe it's somebody you know. I know some of these people. I know her because, well, I know too, because I've actually been involved in this process. There are hundreds of thousands of these women.

1:01They came here legally. They filed the paperwork, the real paperwork, the kind that has a filing fee that costs more than a car payment sometimes. She hired the lawyers. She checked a box that said she would wait. And indeed that's exactly what she had to do. She had to wait. This is year 11 of the waiting. She renews the same status every so often. She pays the same fees again and again and again. She refushes the same government webpage that has not changed her number and longer than her youngest kids probably been alive. She did it that way for one reason. Because she believed that the line was real, that it was moral, that that was the right and the legal and the proper thing to do. And she believed that she stood in it. And she kept her nose clean, had all of the documentation, everything else. And she did not cut one day would be her turn.

2:03Now I want you to keep thinking about that woman. Because today a very smart man in a very good suit sat down in front of Congress this morning and told a room full of people that the line she's standing in is a fiction. This guy's name is David Beer. He runs the Immigration Studies Division at the Cato Institute. And just full disclosure, I support the Cato Institute. I use a lot of their analysis and a lot of the things that they use on this program. He is not a fool, he's not a bomb-thrower, and on the big thing about immigration he's mostly right. Our legal immigration system is broken. It is slow, it is cruel, it makes almost no sense whatsoever. He has spent years documenting that. And I think the numbers are on his side. I think of the people I know who have done it right. They have horror stories for me. Some of those that I have been a part of their

3:07swearing in ceremony, when I was the undersecretary, even they, in the moment of their most happy moment of becoming a United States citizen. If you talk to them, yes, they're incredibly happy. And they're proud to be an American citizen. And they will ask you, but why? Why is it so cruel and expensive and long and hard to become a citizen when I'm doing it the right way? I feel out all of your forms. I go to all of the interviews. I let them do the background checks. I tell them everything about why I'm coming. Everything about my financial situation that I'm not coming here to be, you know, a freeloader, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, just goes odd and odd, odd, odd, and odd, and infinite. But the Kato Institute's David Beer claims something that I want you to hear.

4:08Our immigrant co-workers, neighbors, friends, and family want to contribute to this country legally. Let them fix legal immigration. Imagine if just 3% of gun sales were permitted. Many in this room, myself included, would call that gun prohibition. But that's how few immigrants seeking permanent legal status in the United States through the proper processes actually get approved in a year. For many, there's no legal way at all. If you make legal immigration impossible, don't complain about illegal immigration. You created it. You made it illegal. So yes, focus on justice for victims. But let peaceful people contribute to this country legally. You have it right. You made it illegal. Now I heard that and I'll take exactly what I first thought.

5:10For about 15 seconds, he really had me. It's a clean argument. It's tidy. And it flatters you a little bit because it let you feel fair and worldly and above all the shouting for about 10 seconds. And then I thought about her, that woman in the line. And the whole thing comes apart. The minute you really start thinking it through. So let me do what he did not do. Let's stay in the room with that woman. While I take his logic apart, I want to use his own words, his own numbers, not mine, I want to use his. Stop it that 3% because that's the hook. The whole thing hangs on. Is that hooked at 3% only 3% get approved a year? He compares that to banning 97% of gun sales and then calling that prohibition. And that lands because it's meant to because it sounds like a locked door. And of course, you take the whole emotion about guns and any of us who are second

6:16amendment advocates who believe in the right of self-defense, the God given natural law of self-defense. If we looked at a law that said 97% of gun sales are going to be illegal into this law, we would be in an uproar. In fact, maybe that's what we need to, you know, maybe that's why we have a second amendment because if somebody tried to do that, there would be an uprising. There would not be what we just talked about in the last hour. Here's where that number actually comes from. It's not some open borders talking point. It's from Kato's own research from his own shop. The math is this. There are about a million green cards every year. And there are about 34 million people already in the line waiting for one. Divide the million into 34 million and you get history percent. Now, let's read it back slowly because he's counting on you not to read it

7:17back slowly. That 3% is not the share of people who applied and got told no. It is the share of the line that reaches the front in any given year. 97% were not rejected. They are waiting. And this is the part that should in the argument right there. Kato's own paper says so. It says those people are stuck at earlier stages waiting for their number to come up and the fixed Kato proposes to approve them to let the whole backlog through. You do not propose approving people you just rejected. You approve people who are in line. So think about what he's actually describing. 34 million human beings standing in line waiting for a country that is not a locked door. That's the door that is open. Now, it may be jammed and there may be a line out the building

8:18and around the block. It's a horrible line, but it is a line. Some people will die of old age standing in. Now, that's a scandal. And I'll scream about it with him any day of the week, but it is a line. And the line is a legal way. It is slow, brutal, broken legal way. It is not no way. Which brings me to the one word his whole ending rides on. Impossible. He said, remember, I'll quote him again. If you make illegal immigration impossible, well, wait a minute. Everything after that word depends on that word. You take out that word. Watch what happens to his big finish. You made it illegal turns into you made the way too long. And you know what? On that point, he'd be right. The way it is too long. That's true. And it's damning. And it's worth a part of radio all by itself, which is why I'm doing it because

9:23it is a much smaller sentence than the one he actually said in front of a congressional committee and it's being played all over the news channels today. He needed the word impossible. His own, his very old number though, gave him the word slow. But he said impossible anyway. Well, let me be fair about one thing because he's got a piece of a point, a piece of a point buried in his entire testimony today. And I don't, I'm not going to say he doesn't. He said, for many, there is no legal way at all. We just, well, for some people, that is literally true. There are people who want to come to this country, become citizens who do not fit any category. There's no family here to sponsor them. There's no employer. There's no lottery luck. And for them, there is no line to stand in because we never built one. That's real. Now, if he wants to argue, we should build that line, then let's pull up a chair. But watch his slide of hand.

10:25He looks those people, the ones that don't have a line, the ones that quite frankly, I don't want to have a line. If you don't meet the requirements, I don't want it to have a line to get into just to be told later. No. He blended them into the 34 million who are in line. And he used the size of the one group and the hopelessness of the other to paint you a picture, a locked door, a line where you're just everybody's jamming in and the door's locked and you can't get in. When, when, when, why he's really got is just a jammed line plus a separate group, he'd like a line four to different problems, but he's using the one dramatic word impossible to cover them both. But here's what his own mouth gives away. Go back to how he opened. He said, immigrants want to contribute to this country legally, let them. He's praising these people.

11:26He is holding them up as folks who want to do it the right way, the lawful way, the way the woman in year 11 did it. But then he closes by telling you the unlawful way was never anybody's choice that Congress made that happen. Remember, he said that you made it illegally, illegal. Well, which isn't because both of those cannot be true in the same speech and the same testimony. If following the law is something to admire, something these good people want to do, then not following the law is a choice. It's a different choice. Now, the person who makes that choice owns that choice. The same way the woman in line owns hers. She has decided. She's frustrated. She's angry upset, but she's waiting in line and she's patiently refreshing the page every day to see if she's gotten her card yet. You cannot pin a

12:35medal on her chest for waiting and then tell the man who cut in front of her illegally that it wasn't really his call. It was Congress's. His whole opening is a tribute to people who choose the line that tribute is the proof that the line could have been chosen. I would have should be chosen. But he wants it both ways. He wants the honest immigrant to be a hero for obeying the law and the illegal crossing to be nobody's fault because the law was hard. Now, come on, Buck O' Pick one because the moment you admire her, you've admitted you had a choice. And that last move, someone that really else taken your crawl. Don't complain about illegal immigration you created it. He's telling you that you can want the legal system fixed or you can object to people breaking it,

13:36but you can't do both. That the two positions, positions cancel each other out. That's a trick. And it's an old trick because I am that person that holds those two positions. I want a legal system. I think our legal system is broken. I think it's inefficient. It's also a product of us failing to prioritize the kind of system that is fair, efficient and does the job is meant to do. Just little footnote to my notes here. Imagine if TSA was like immigration, well, immigration and naturalization services that dates me. If the lines were the same. If the TSA line was the same as the legal immigration line, you would be screaming.

14:37But you never deal with that because you are an American citizen. You were born here to American parents. I hope not to illegal aliens. That's another story. I would be screaming that and I do scream that because I have stood before those people have done it the legal way and looked at their pride and have done in there having done it the legal way. And I say, good for you at the same time that I'm sorry that it took so long. Everybody I know really does want both. Fix the front door so it actually opens and locked this window over here so that people will stop climbing through it illegally. Those are not opposites and that is not hypocrisy. That's most of the country I think on any given day. But he wants you to believe those two wishes are at war with each other or opposite of each other because if they're not his whole gotcha falls apart. So he just declares, oh they are. He asserts it.

15:41He never proves it. Here's what I want to say. Looking right at that woman, the woman in line. The system is broken. He is right about that. Congress needs to fix it. They need to put more resources in. They need to do whatever it takes to make that system efficient. Build a line for the people who do not have one. Shorten the weight so it's counted in months and not decades. I'm all the way with him on the disease but I will not sign on to the cure because his cure is a lie told about her. When he says you made it illegal. When he says the crossing was never a choice. He is erasing the one person in the entire story who has the most right to be angry. Not him. Not even me. The woman that did it the right way. The woman who did it the hard way because she believes the rules are real and the rules in complying with the rules shows how much she wants to be a

16:41US citizen. His argument tells her the rules were never real. The line was never really a lie and every year she waited well she was a sucker for waiting. I don't believe that. I don't think believe the woman that waited in line. I don't think she believes that either. I don't think a man who opened by praising her honesty gets to close by calling it pointless. The line is real. I freely admit that. Some woman is standing in it. Fix the line. Don't tell her it was never there. I want to hear from you. This one because I know. I know some of you probably came here the hard way or maybe your parents did or your grandparents did. Text line of course is always open 3 3 1 0 3 key word micro micro. I'd like to know how long your line was. Tell me what you paid. What you waited. What it did to your family to do it with the right way. Yeah because those stories stories that you have are the answer to the man in the really nice suit that's sitting in front of Congress

17:47on tifigating on behalf of the Kato Institute and your stories are probably better than any of his stories. Quite frankly if you've got stories I wish you were in that seat and not him. Wow. The 33% number where it comes from what it actually measures the part of his testimony that's true right next to the part that isn't true. Go back and listen to it because this is the kind of crap that goes on in congressional hearings and not one congressman would ever stop and say wait a minute. We brought you here as one of our witnesses to talk about how you know we we need to fix the integration system which we do. But then he calls them out and says you made it illegal and you made the illegal easy. Hobbs and choice and a false choice. Hey Michael just wondering if all this waiting in line is actually one of those really odd things that we hear every couple of years about how many hours people wait in line. If they added in how long and it

18:54legal applicant is working towards getting their citizenship I think they would be actually a lot longer for us to wait in line. It would bump that up by exponential anyway just to thought. Speaking lines. Hey Raj really proud of that bumper music. So proud. You saw him live? I saw them live. They opened up. Well they were part of Ringo's All Star band. Oh okay. Incredible. They sounded that good. And where was it? Elko. Elko. Okay. Incredible. That song, Toto. Still got it. God, that was good. That's that's a good theater. It's a great theater. Great. Yeah. Yeah. That once every 10 years, not once about every 10 years, the government has one job the constitution actually spells that kind of them black and white. Count the people. All of them one time knocking every door, mail every form right down. How many souls live in this country? And where they live? That's there's the assignment that's it. It sounds

19:55like the easiest thing in the world, right? But almost everything in the house in our politics sits on top of that number they come up with. How many members of Congress that you're, you know, the color of the gets or your state comes right off that number. Your electoral electoral votes for president come off that number because the state's electoral votes are how seats plus its two senators and hundreds of billions of federal dollars every year. Highways, Medicaid, schools, all right on formulas that all start with that number. You get it right. The map is fair or accurate for 10 years. Get it wrong. And the wrong rides for 10 years. And there's really nothing you could do about it at the ballot box to fix it. It's in the constitution. One count 10 years, no take backs, right? So let me tell you what the government found when they decided, hey,

20:56maybe this time we ought to go back and audit greater own work. In May of 2022, I call this the confession. The Census Bureau did something that agencies almost never do. They published their own report card and they did it publicly. The Bureau runs the internal audit after every census they call it the post enumeration survey. Now in cabling, literally, send workers back out to a fresh sample of households. They castles people again from scratch and they hold that what they consider to be a clean count up against the original official count. It is the government checking the government, right? The government checking the government. And the spring four years ago, they put out the results for the 2020 count. 14 states wrongly counted. Now by rounding there wrong by a margin large enough that the statisticians at the Bureau itself said, out loud,

22:00oh, this is real. This is not just, you know, an anomaly. Six states were under counted. Eight states were over counted. Listen to the size. Four of them. Yeah, I read state was under counted by three and a half percent. So in a state of what, 22 million people, three and a half percent comes to somewhere around seven hundred fifty thousand human beings who were never counted for. Picture a city size of Denver. Now picture nobody. The Bureau knowing this is there. Yeah. Tennessee got under counted by almost five percent. Texas got under counted June. And over on the other side of the ledger, the states counted too high. Delaware, Rhode Island, New York, Hawaii, Minnesota, all of them. Pat, let's say, patten. And the Bureau is the one that sent all of this. Not me. Nobody dragged out of them. They stood in the middle of the count. Wrong. Their word for it was regrettable. Sounds like dinner. Girls, well, doesn't look. Oh, I made

23:05a mistake and I'm sorry. And they were quick to add that the data are still in their phrase, only but it's still fit for use. I mean, it's wrong fit for use. Regrettable. There's the story right there. Wrong. Regrettable. Fit for use. And then they said the parts that I'll make you just wait, what? Nothing can do be down about this until 2030. The count is locked. The seats are locked. The money for me just keep right on running off the wrong numbers year after year after year all the way to the next census. They confessed. They screwed up and in the very same breath declared, but the screw up is permanent. We can't do anything about it. So here's a federal agency telling us in writing that they miscounted pretty much the entire country. And then it told you that, well, we'll just live inside that miscount for 10 years. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? Not shocking. I

24:07didn't say it was shocking. I said, it's amazing, isn't it? But one of the stakes, they're not just numbers buried in a report that nobody's ever going to read. So a state that gets counted too high is right now maybe holding a seat in Congress and one electoral vote for president and a whole stream of highway and Medicaid money that this audit would say you probably didn't earn that. Now, then a state that got counted too short gets handed all of it anyway. Not for a new cycle for 10 years through the next presidential election. And the midterms after that and everything in between. Every hour after that decade, the wrong map is the official map. There is, when I started digging into this, a really what I would just call an easy version of the story. And it is a partisan story too. Red states got robbed, blue states got padded. And if you

25:10line up nothing but the state numbers, it does indeed lean that way. Most of the undercounted Stoke states vote Republican. Most of the overcounted states vote Democrat. So stare at that. And what do you do? Well, some might start reaching for conspiracy and they'll do it before I get out of here for lunch. But the very same audit measured something else. And what I found weird is it points in exactly the opposite direction. When the bureau looked at who got missed, sorted by race, the answer was pretty ugly and not partisan. The 2020 count undercounted Hispanic residents by almost 5%. It undercounted black residents by more than 3%. It undercounted native Americans that were living on reservations by more than 5% and then it overcounted white residents and overcounted Asian residents. Think about that. The people the government actually failed to write down were with anybody else in the country. The very communities that the political left says

26:15they always got a war for. So if you want to tell me some sort of story where this count was some kind of machine built to help one party, then you're going to have to explain how the same machine missed those very people. Most of all, that just doesn't add up. Does it? Here's where I think both sides are missing when the yellow diesel across and they are, they're yelling at each other across the island Congress all the time. And particularly about this. Just take a conservative sitting in Nashville. That person's got a real grievance. Tennessee gave up genuine representation. It was owed. They've got a right in Tennessee to be sore about that. The civil rights advocate in Chicago, well they've got a grievance too. Illinois, that was the blues you can get. Undercounted right alongside the red ones and they've actually lost a congressional seat over it. At the same time black and Latino residents in that state in that blue state got missed. So those people there right to be pissed off about that too. So

27:19everybody's right. The same broken count did everybody wrong at the same time. A bad count does not check your party registration before it missed. Hey, we screwed up. And before any of Biden Colorado gets too comfortable pointing the finger on, I don't know, maybe Delaware. Colorado has eight members of Congress. We picked up that eighth seat out of that 2020 count. A new seat, a new voice in DC, and one more electoral vote for Colorado in the bargain. Now I'm uncomfortable about this. The annals who went back and ran the corrected numbers estimate that our eighth seat was one of the very last ones handed out in the whole country. And that if Texas and Florida had been counted right, that seat goes to one of them and not to Colorado. We won a chair. The numbers say belong to somebody else. And here we are sitting in that seat

28:29very comfortable ever since nobody's saying it. The fellow holding an extra chair never feels like it's you know, I didn't take anything. I was just there and I ran for it and I got it. He just feels like a God has got to care. That's exactly how a broken census count works on everyone. And the fight is really alive right now. Yeah, the numbers frozen. That was the story back in 2022. Now we're in 2026 and all this is coming roaring back to life and you ought to know about it because it's moving pretty fast down in Florida. You know, Byron Donnell's, you're the congressman right now. He's currently running for governor. Just got the endorsement of of the Santos yesterday. And then a group of college Republicans leave it to them. College kids. They took the census mural to court. Now their argument is the one I've been making to you since I started. They say the bureau leaned on statistical guesswork instead of a real head count that the

29:32guesswork is what cost Florida that seat and then an honest count hands that seat right back. The lower courts threw that case out. So they appealed. And as of this month, it is sitting on the document of the Supreme Court of the United States. The bureau was ordered to answer by the middle of September. So the question of anything, whether anything can be done about the 2020 count is not settled at all. There were still waiting for, you know, response briefs. What's there to do, I think, in a couple of weeks. But this is live. And it's in front of the highest court in the land as I'm telling you the story. At the very same time, though, the Trump administration has been swinging at the census from a different angle. And that's pretty interesting. So Michael, if I regrettably miscounted my assets sold, let's say, underneath what it actually sold

30:32to pay less capital gains tax to the IRS, would that be okay? And just a regrettable mistake? Jeez, maybe, maybe I should try that. But somehow it doesn't work both ways. It doesn't have a good day. No, you can do that. But you have to make sure you spell the word regrettable. And sorry, correctly. And if you do that, then I, the way I read the tax code, then you're fine. Just, hey, I undercounted, I undervalued and I regret having done that. And I am so, so sorry. My dad is so, so, so sorry. You know, them do that. So Trump orders a new count. He sees this problem, orders a new count. His own commerce secretary steps up to the microphone and says, well, I can't really do that. Only Congress is the Constitution. So that gets done. But then Trump says, okay, his Trump's never done, right? He says, I'll do something else then. In the next one, you were going to do two counts. We're going to count citizens and non-citizens. That's the draft

31:38rule that's moving through the Commerce Department right now for the 2030 census. And that's something to worth. I think arguing about it. I think it's actually a pretty good rule. I'm, I'm going to suspiciously come assorting Americans into racial boxes so the government can pass out, you know, power and money by the pound. But walk this one through with me anyway. The thing almost honest, damning fact in this whole story, the fact that proves the count was broken not rigged is that the bureau missed black and Hispanic and native residents worst. And we only know that because the bureau measured it. So turn off the race data. You've not fixed a single undercount. You've just ripped the batteries out of the smoke detector, right? You cannot stand up and throw you finally counted everybody if you stop keeping track of who you missed. And I'm saying this to the Trump team, go ahead and count legal illegal or count citizens. I mean, just

32:41well, just count everybody, but add something on the tabulation that yes, this person is a citizen, this person is a non-citizen. So that would change several things. That would change the count that goes into how many seats is a place yet. Because why should you be representing people who are not citizens of this country? Huh? I thought my congressman was supposed to represent the citizens of his state. Call me silly, but I think that this whole undercount and will know more maybe later in the month when we get some response briefs to the US Supreme Court and we start getting hearings. But I just want you to be aware that undercounts and overcounts Trump's trying to do something and it ain't over because the fat lady up on Capitol Hill, the Supreme Court, that's not spoken yet. Why are you dealing with listening to Armstrong and getting on to men? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring and tedious and depressing and makes you angry. You don't

33:42want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. How about something about a comedic tone? We have a winner? Yes. Listen to Armstrong and Getty on to man on the iHeart radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.