Between 1880 and 1930, Congress and statisticians tried to create standards to mandate that census information couldn't be used for "taxation, regulation or investigation" or to "harm" a people or organizations, as explained by Margo Anderson, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in a related paper.

Circumventing those standards, the U.S. government used census data to locate and deliver more than 100,000 Japanese Americans to incarceration camps. This happened, Anderson pointed out, before the United States was an "equal opportunity, affirmative action, civil rights society" and when Japanese immigrants were considered "aliens ineligible for citizenship." She pointed out in a conversation with NPR that at the time, "nobody disputed the legal foundation for incarcerating" the so-called aliens.

In the case of Japanese Americans, the question was not "who was Japanese, but where did Japanese mainly live," said Kenneth Prewitt, a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau who is now a professor at Columbia University. "Yes, census data can be inappropriately used to target for attention particular neighborhoods where persons of MENA ancestry are concentrated," Prewitt said. But, he said, doing so would not be any more illegal than targeting "places where elderly people live, to know where to send rescue vehicles in case of flooding or power outings or where veterans live in order to place VA hospitals nearby. So the issue is not who clusters where but for what purposes is that information used."