So the government has a rough idea of how many non citizens are in Australia, and roughly where. So any services that non-citizens may need (tourism centres, consulates, etc) get put in the right place.
So the government has a rough idea of how many non citizens are in Australia, and roughly where. So any services that non-citizens may need (tourism centres, consulates, etc) get put in the right place.
To hazard a guess (don't know for sure, not even for my own country), it's for future historians to be able to build up a picture of who was where and when.
What might seem obvious and common knowledge now might not be in 100 years.
Much shorter term, the point of the census is to know where people are and what they need, so government spending can be done effectively. No point building hospitals/centrelink/etc in areas that don't need them.
Australian census records are (opt-in) deanonymised after 100 years, so there is some historical value.
If you don't live there, legally or not, you don't have to do it.
After doing some research on the US census website, my best guess is that, yes, tourists are required by law to complete the census. Though they definitely seem like an afterthought, since I couldnt find any direct reference to tourists completing the census. And also, while technically legally required, on the same page that explains that you are legally required to respond to the census, the government also wrote a whole section about why you should respond to the census.
So in practice, almost no tourists are going to complete a census form, and they will face no legal consequences as the census has basically no legal enforcement mechanism.
As for your followup - why would they want tourists on the census? - Well, because they want the best data they can get. They're a bunch of nerds collecting data to do statistics on. Why would they just leave data on the floor?
No, President Dumbass definitely wants a census. The census explicitly needs to count all residents, but he wants to add questions about citizenship to it specifically so he (and Stephen Miller) can have a list of non-citizen residents to harass.
If they get their way, by the time the census after that one is taken, there won't be any non-citizen residents to count anymore.
They don't care about having a list of non-citizens to harass -- they just do that based on skin color.
What they care about is having a mechanism to force an undercount in blue states, so they can get red states further disproportionate power in the House and electoral college.
The Census is basically more mandatory in the US constitution than a lot of other things people might think are more important.
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