A test pilot aimed at improving the efficiency of the next census is causing alarm among a large coalition of politicians, and community and legal agencies, which is afraid that it will perpetuate the miscount of minorities in 2010.
According to the coalition’s report, the net result of undercounting would be a loss of millions of dollars in federal, state and local assistance for the communities. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) has formed a Latino working group composed of representatives from various community agencies to ensure that this does not happen.
The U.S. Census Bureau picked northwest Queens – the country’s most ethnically diverse area – in order to carry out the test that measures the composition of the families. The zone includes Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and Corona, all predominately Latino.
But the forms are in English only.
“Forty-two percent of the residents in this area do not speak English,” said Marta Hauzen, president of an organization of Colombians that is part of the PRLDEF coalition.
The people who do not respond to the pilot will receive a visit from a Census worker who will test the functioning of their new method of entering the data by palm pilot – a portable organizer. Assemblyman Jose Peralta, councilmembers Jon Liu and Helen Sears, as well as N.Y. State Assembly members Ivan Lafayette and Catherine T. Nolan were among the politicians who voiced their concerns yesterday and asked that the U.S. Census Bureau set more resources aside to reach the entire community of this sector of Queens.
“We‘ve had enough of being tired of not being counted,” said Peralta, remembering that in the last census a million Latinos throughout the country were not counted. “We’re here to tell the U.S. Census Bureau that we’re watching them,” he added.
Even though this test will not necessarily have an impact on how the next census will be carried out, the coalition denounced that there was a lack of willingness by the pilot testers to reach the community.
“This is not going to have an affect over the count,” said Tony Farthing, a U.S Census representative, who attributed the fact that the form was only in English to the limited resources available to deal with a test.
