The Republicans have tried just about every trick in their book in an attempt to stigmatize and ignore those in this country who don’t fall under the banner of “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant”. During the Republican primaries the suggestions as to how to stem the tide of illegal immigration–which, by the way, had been decreasing for some time already and is now at a net-zero–became increasingly punitive and downright bizarre.

First the Republican candidates tried to best each other by competing over who could build the highest border fence; finally, Herman Cain threw human decency to the wind and ‘joked‘ that he would build an alligator-filled moat and 20-feet fence topped by electrical wire. Hahaha! Alligators eating illegal immigrants and electrifying those that don’t get eaten! Um yeah, I don’t get the joke.

Fewer non-hispanic white babies are being born in the U.S. than at any time in history.

White Republicans are hearing all this news about changing demographics and they are starting to run scurrrred.

But they’ve got a new trick up their sleeves: Just don’t count the minorities! Yep, you read that right, the Republicans are hoping that if the government doesn’t count the minorities then it will be that much easier to pretend as if they don’t really exist. In the House of Representatives, the Republicans have introduced a bill to eliminate the American Community Survey (ACS), a survey that has been around since 1850 and keeps track of all-types of useful information about U.S. demographics. ACS data is culled from “a representative, randomized sample of about three million American households about demographics, habits, languages spoken, occupation, housing and various other categories. The resulting numbers are released without identifying individuals, and offer current demographic portraits of even the country’s tiniest communities.”

If you have every done any demographic research then it is almost guaranteed that you have used data from ACS. According to Next American City:

The federal government as well as state, county and city governments rely on ACS data. Education dollars must go where there are students, anti-poverty dollars must go where there are poor people and roads must be built where people are moving. A 2010 study by the Brookings Institution found that “In [fiscal year] 2008, 184 federal domestic assistance programs used ACS-related datasets to help guide the distribution of $416 billion, 29 percent of all federal assistance.” This includes funding for everything from Medicaid to transportation.

And why the Republicans complaining that the ACS should be discontinued? They claim it violates privacy rights, despite the fact that no identifying information is revealed about individuals who complete the survey.

Moats filled with alligators, electrified fences, and not collecting the data. What will those crazy Republicans think of next in an attempt to avoid acknowledging that his country is changing–whether they accept it or not.