Will Counting Arabs Make Them Terrorists?
By: Lyman Stone
Tags: Economics, Census, Immigration, Conservatives, Migration

Most Countries Count Race

Here’s a map of countries with race counted in at least 1 Census since 1991:

Now, this map is a bit misleading, because not all countries are counting anything like what we call “race.” Take Russia, for example. Under Tsarist rule in the 19th Century, population surveys or censuses often did not ask about language or ethnic identity, until 1897 when, as a concession, they asked about language (but they asked about language in Russian, so, not exactly an unbiased sample). The Tsarist government suppressed local ethnic identity, and they thought limiting the presentation of these groups in official data might help. The Bolsheviks, however, managed to gain extra support from minority ethnic groups by promising to recognize them: and upon the first Soviet Censuses, dozens or even hundreds of ethnic groups were recognized. However, these were ethno-linguistic groups, not racial groups like in the US. Of course, the Soviets then tried to game their own system to get people to identify with state-provided ethnic groups. If you weren’t on the list somewhere, you were forced to identify as something on the list, because Soviets were really big about lists.

No but, seriously, this is a great test case. A government tried to use ethnicity-blind-ish censuses to promote a single national identity. This (allegedly, and I’ll return to the plausibility of this story later) gave extremists an “in” with minority groups that felt unrecognized. Those extremists took over and gave recognition to their client groups, but then used control of that recognition to try and push society towards a preferred political state exactly as the Tsarists had done. In the first case, non-racial census-taking was the tool for trying to manipulate ethnic identity. In the second, ethnically-specific census-taking was the tool. Today, Russia recognizes over 160 ethnic groups.

We can also look at at modern authoritarian states, such as Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan has not had any Census since 1989. They do a periodic “10% sample” of debatable quality, but even that hasn’t tracked ethnicity since 1996. Why no full Census? Well there are many reasons, but one suggestion by some observers is that the government doesn’t want to acknowledge how large the ethnic minorities in the country, especially Tajiks, have become. In this case, the authoritarian government avoids information provision in order to reduce the prevalence of ethnic minorities.

Similarly, Rwanda’s first post-genocide Census did not track Hutus and Tutsis, although it did track national-origin still, even aside from citizenship. The French Census meanwhile, along with much of Europe, is devotedly non-racial. The exception to the European norm of non-racial Censuses is in the British Isles, where Ireland and the UK do track race or ethnicity in the Census. Here we see a difference from the norm, in that Ireland and the UK tend to be the most accepting of other races. Ireland and the UK are generally regarded as being far better at integrating immigrants than, say, Germany, France, or Belgium (hence why France and Belgium in particular have high rates of radicalization and ISIS-membership among their Arab and Muslim populations).

You’re probably getting an idea of what my point is here. Governments that try to use the Census as a policy tool generally either fail, or succeed, and the result is a humanitarian catastrophe. You can’t use the Census to change people. It does not work. Ethnic identities are not fixed, but they are unlikely to be changed by government bureaucrats. It is amazing for Heritage, which usually has such a low opinion of government’s power to get things done, to here assert that something as mundane as counting people who identify as from the Middle East would destroy assimilation efforts. More to the point, of those countries that ignore race and ethnicity, the actual experience is very mixed. In Rwanda this choice has come after over a decade of healing and reconciliation, so it’s hard to say exactly what the impact has been, but it seems plausible that avoiding topics of ethnicity have been helpful for them. Meanwhile in Uzbekistan and France, avoidance of race and ethnicity serves to aid the interests of authoritarians and alienate ethnic minorities further.

What should we make of this? Perhaps this: in the context of a huge government-led effort to force embittered people to get along and mandate desegregation and affirmative action, as we see in Rwanda, a choice to avoid a Census count of ethnicity probably makes sense. Some ethnic groups may fear being counted, and for good reason! And when your government is laser-focused on a huge social engineering project like post-genocide reconciliation, it makes sense to deploy the Census for some ancillary backup.

But most American conservatives dislike the idea of social engineering. Few support aggressive affirmative action campaigns. It is rare to see conservatives calling for radical housing programs to encourage residential and educational integration. The Rwandan experience is not the USA.

Rather, the case of the UK or France is more apt. Integration programs are politically fraught. Ethnic minorities often feel alienated and persecuted when excluded from official recognition, especially given that we have always provided official recognition to major groups in the past. Comparing the UK and France, it is difficult to believe that a person could prefer the racial politics of France to the racial politics of the UK. Certainly no national security writer and foreign policy expert at the Heritage Foundation should be holding up France’s policy towards its racial minorities as exemplary.

(Sidenote: India doesn’t count race…. and has been identified in various sources as one of the most racist countries on earth.)