The purpose of the census is enumeration for establishing voter districts. This implies you would not count non-citizens.
As an extreme example, there are over 700k people in each election district. If the residents were 100% non-citizens, then these non-citizens would have their own representative in congress!
I think shortcuts are unreliable, other than trying to scrap the bs and go to the main point, as I sort of did above.
Shorthand analysis isn’t meant to be reliable, but then, it does boil down to “Define reliable”.
I find I am occasionally wrong when I look at an advocate for some thing, and just say out of hand “If that person is all for it, it cannot be good for this country”, etc.
But I find that it is spot on for me more than 90% of the time. So, my takeaway is that I probably should pick and choose my spots a bit more carefully, and triage them appropriately to use a shorthand analysis on.