The U.S. census stopped asking all residents if they were U.S. citizens or their place of birth in the 1950 census.

Two senators want to return a citizenship question to the 2010 census. On Oct. 7 Republican Senators Bob Bennett, Utah, and David Vitter, La., introduced an amendment to stop funding the 2010 census unless it includes a question of citizenship status.

“If the current census plan goes ahead, the inclusion of non-citizens toward apportionment will artificially increase the population count in certain states, and that will likely result in the loss of congressional seats for nine other states, including Louisiana,” said Vitter in an Oct. 16 press release.

Congress agreed to the census questionnaire in 2008, as required by law. Printing of the questionnaires started this summer. Let’s look at the history of the Census and citizenship as the Senate tackles the Vitter/Bennett amendment.

The U.S. Constitution requires that the government count every man, woman and child living in the U.S. every 10 years. The Founding Fathers created the every-10-year census to determine how many seats to award each state in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Yes, the census has always been about power. That’s why the South insisted that the census count non-citizens. When U.S. marshals conducted the first census in 1790, they counted the slaves.

Slaves were not citizens. They had no rights. They were considered property like the pigs. But, the census counted them as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of the census, giving Southern states more political clout.

The citizenship question first appeared in the 1820 census and remained there in various forms until 1960 — 170 years. Here’s a sampling of how the Census has asked about citizenship.