As crucial count gets started, experts fear many will be missed
By Mark Hedin, Ethnic Media Services
With the United States about to begin its monumental task of counting everybody in the country once every 10 years, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing on Thursday, January 9, to see what the Census Bureau is doing to avoid overlooking so-called “hard to count” communities.
Arturo Vargas of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials objected to the “hard-to-count” designation: “What makes people hard to count are the enumeration strategies.”
For instance, he said, all outreach
efforts to Latinx residents are in Spanish. And despite the Supreme Court
barring the proposed addition of a question about everyone’s citizenship, the
Census Bureau, he said, is squandering its “trusted brand” status by forbidding
staff from discussing what has become a very alarming concern, particularly in
ethnic communities.
Vargas was joined at the committee hearing dais by Marc Morial of the Urban League, Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference, John Yang of Asian American Advancing Justice, Kevin Allis of the National Congress of American Indians and Darrell Moore of the Center for South Georgia Regional Impact.
In her initial remarks, Gupta cited the
Census Bureau’s slow pace of hiring for the enormous task: “The Census Bureau
has acknowledged that it’s way behind. It needs more applicants in all 50
states.”
This year, the Census Bureau is
optimistic that computerizing the primary response mechanism for the first time
will help minimize the expense of tabulating printed questionnaires and paying
enumerators to knock on the doors of non-responders.
But it also is doing all its hiring
online, which has depressed interest, and is having to compete in a relatively
strong job market as compared to the run-up to the 2010 Census. Other reasons
cited for the hiring lag include that, as the first census to prioritize online
responses, enumerators have to be comfortable with tech tools. And the hiring and
onboarding process, including background checks, has been so drawn out that applicants
have drifted off in pursuit of other opportunities.
Vargas, like others, recalled the
troubled rollout of the healthcare.gov website set up to enroll people in the
Affordable Care Act and recommended that the Census Bureau be ready with plenty
of paper questionnaires in case the online response rate falls short of
expectations.
Even in its rosiest predictions, the
Census Bureau still only expects about a 60% initial response rate via online
questionnaires, Morial noted. For African American men, 40% is probably more
realistic, he added.
Yang criticized census hiring for
being slow and “inconsistently inclusive” in its diversity. He cited the
chilling effect of the failed citizenship question proposal, which makes it even
more important that enumerators and partnership specialists be culturally
competent.
He also noted that the written
questionnaire, available only in Spanish or English, excludes Asian Americans, the
fastest-growing minority group in the country. Yang did, however, single out for praise the recent announcement
of media campaigns in Hindi and Urdu.
The Native American population,
which the Census Bureau believes it undercounted by at least 4.9% in 2010, is
plagued by mistrust, privacy concerns, a sense of futility as to the usefulness
of responding at all and the feeling that going online to fill out the census form,
not always even possible, is a significant risk, Allis said.
Census-taking is about to begin in
Alaska (Jan. 21), but no native partnership specialists are on board yet, he
said. And as with hiring, the census’ work to establish partnerships with community
organizations to help obtain a complete count is behind schedule.
New Mexico Democratic Rep. Deb
Haaland, one of only two Native women ever elected to the House, noted the
absence of Navajo-language census materials.
“Does the Census Bureau understand our needs?” Allis asked. “Hard to say.” The way things are going so far, he said, “is deeply concerning” and lacks “proper attention given to the purpose of the census, what it can do, what it can’t. The Census Bureau has identified this as an issue, but we have yet to see that this will be addressed properly.”
“The census is a big deal,” Morial said, echoing Allis’ call for increased advertising and media outreach and a hope that accurate census data will improve decision-making and equitable distribution of resources and political representation. That outreach, he emphasized, should extend all the way through the non-response follow-up process scheduled into August.
Morial also noted, with chagrin, that
in the waning days of the Obama administration, the census had been on the
brink of reversing its policy of counting prisoners where they’re incarcerated
and not in their home communities.
Moore attracted attention for his
reports on organizing efforts in rural Georgia. As committee members from both
sides of the aisle pressed him for one-size-fits-all ideas on how to reach
rural populations, he repeated that the answers lie with local organizers and
activists.
“You’ve got to have trusted voices in your community,” he counseled Arizona GOP Rep. Paul Gosar. “The communities know about their needs best — what works in one community will not work in others.”
Responding to West Virginia GOP Rep.
Carol Miller’s concerns about the mountain communities she represents,
considered 60% hard to count, Moore advocated more creative outreach efforts, perhaps
at sporting events and churches, in addition to the food pantries and mobile
mammogram services she had suggested.
Vargas listed educators, health care
providers, local officials and minority-led organizations including newspapers
and radio as trusted sources for census outreach. Many at the hearing advocated
using librarians and, particularly as a way to meet the technology concerns,
libraries themselves to help maximize participation.
A benefit of the computerized effort
is that easily sortable data will reveal where there’s more work to be done in
getting people counted, and where the census is being embraced, Yang noted.
“The Census Bureau better step up its game and respond to the concerns we’ve raised today, or the risk is grave. It’s time to ring the alarm bell,” Morial warned.
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