When the government announces a fact or figure, be it a complex budget forecast or simple school enrollment, conventional wisdom holds that the numbers are, more or less, accurate. Not so with the U.S. Census – at least, not in the past.
In 2000, more than 3 million people were missed in the so-called “snapshot of America” – most of them low-income, African American, living in rural areas, or immigrants.
That might not matter so much if the government did not depend on population figures to dole out more than $400 billion for school funding, child care infrastructure and a host of other programs. National studies estimate that states lost from $1,500 to $3,000 for each person who went uncounted 10 years ago.
“There’s a lot of money at stake,” said An M. Le of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center who is spearheading an effort to reverse the trend among Asian communities in California, up to 5 percent of whom were uncounted in the last census.“We need to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” she said, acknowledging that undercounts were responsible for major funding losses in her home state.
Beyond dollars, census figures also have political ramifications that can last for decades. The population count is used to reapportion Congressional seats and this year’s will affect legislative districts in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas – all of which stand to gain at least one congressional seat and Electoral College vote, based on the numbers.
So across the country, community organizers like Le are fanning out to educate hard-to-count groups about the financial and political importance of participating.
An ad that ran during the Super Bowl and a 30-second spot taped by President Obama may help spread the word. But despite the federal government’s undertaking the most extensive outreach campaign in the history of the census (getting the message out in 28 languages), it may be difficult to overcome the language barriers, lack of awareness, and fear so often generated by the 10-question form. That’s where grassroots community activists are playing an increasingly important role.
Every night at 5:30, Nelson Benitez and five volunteers go door to door, trying to prepare residents of Chicago’s Albany Park for the census. In 2000, Benitez said, the neighborhood was undercounted by 50 percent. (Nationwide, between 500,000 and 800,000 blacks were uncounted, according to government estimates.) Sometimes people are asleep when he knocks and for Benitez the symbolism is inescapable. “The power is sleeping,” he says. “This is the reason why I’m door-knocking, to tell the people, ‘Hey, wake up! Please, wake up. Don’t live in the dark.’”
A 2010 poll by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press revealed that a third of Latino Americans have never heard of the U.S. Census. And last time around .7 percent of them – or up to 400,000 people were not recorded.
In some rural areas of Texas, only one out of every 10 residents was counted in 2000, according to Juanita Valdez-Cox of the community organization La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), who has been door-knocking for weeks to educate families. “The whole rest of the time you live in the shadows,” she said. “But now it’s sort of like the jolt of recognition. The federal government is saying, ‘You’re important.’ Because if you let yourself be counted, you’re helping your community, you’re helping your school, your hospital, your clinic.”
In Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, reaching out to the hard-to-count – that is, the geographically isolated and politically marginalized – may be the only way to ensure a fairer distribution of federal funds, said Michael Seifert, a network weaver for Equal Voice, the national campaign to empower low-income families, supported by Marguerite Casey Foundation.
“Percentage-wise, people [in low-income communities] pay far more in taxes than those in wealthier areas and receive dramatically fewer benefits from this same investment,” he said. “[The census] is one of the simplest ways to bring about immediate change in our area.”
Yet lack of awareness about the Constitutionally-mandated count is widespread: In California, An Le said she had spoken with well-engaged voters and city government workers, all of whom assumed the census had little bearing on their lives.
Until, that is, Le enlightened them about the money at stake, the effect on political representation, and the ways that population count affects everything from school funding to Medicaid. “Then they say, ‘Oh, wow, I need to talk with my parents about this,” she said.
A major barrier within Asian communities is language. More than a third of Asians living in California have difficulty understanding English, and to combat this, Le uses anything she can – ethnic media, social networking sites, even children. “We’re trying to be creative,” Le said. “The youth act as a bridge between their parents and the broader community.”
But too often, the Census Bureau itself needs educating. This year, the Vietnamese-language form translates the word “census” into “population investigation” – a term used by the Communist government in Vietnam that did not go over well with Vietnamese immigrants here.
“Folks that lived here responded very strongly to that word,” Le said. “They went from annoyance to flat-out, ‘I’m not filling out that form – that scares me!’”
Le alerted officials to the gaffe, but it was too late. The census forms had already been printed (though the government did adjust its Web site).
Fear is the great enemy of the population count. With 20 percent of California’s Koreans and 15 percent of the Thai community undocumented, it is no surprise that many are reluctant to tell the government about themselves. Along the Mexican border, where immigration raids are commonplace, organizers face similar problems.
The mistrust exists in big cities, too.
“We knocked on 80 doors one night,” said Nelson Benitez in Chicago. Among them, 10 residents refused to open their homes. So Benitez asked, “If you are afraid, what happens when you go buy a cell phone? You give all this information – private information – and it’s shared with any companies, including the police department and immigration.”
Not so with the census, he explains. No government agency – not Immigration, law enforcement, housing authorities, or courts – can get at your answers for 72 years. No census worker may ask about your citizenship or Social Security number. Anyone who violates the confidentiality of your information is subject to a five-year jail sentence and $250 million fine.
Along the U.S.-Mexico border, community activists illustrate the importance of the 10-year count with a role-playing game. Juanita Valez-Cox holds education sessions monthly for residents of Texas colonias, many of whom are U.S. citizens living without water, sewage or other basic services. Standing on a stage, she gathers a group and tells them to face their neighbors.
“We put 10 people up front,” she said. “Of the 10, only one is going to face the audience. And they say, ‘Why is everybody giving us their backs?’ And we tell them that in the last census, only one in 10 of us got counted. Do you want to count?”
Always, she said, they answer, “Yes, yes, we do!”
2011 © Equal Voice Newspaper