The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) released a monitoring report on the 2010 Census, on March 29th. The report, which collected data and complaints about the Census from twelve states across the nation, pointed out several problems areas on how the Census worked with Asian Americans, such as that it did not provide translation in Cantonese and Taishanese. AALDEF has already forwarded the report results to Robert M. Groves, head of the Census Bureau.
AALDEF is asking the Census Bureau to improvement on the following eight issues:
• Although the telephone questionnaire assistance center provides translation in Chinese, it is limited to Mandarin. It does not provide help to elder Chinese who only speak Cantonese or Taishanese. The limited translation service is even worse for other ethnic minority groups. There are complaints that the Korean operators did not know enough Korean to answer questions and that Vietnamese operators simply read directly from the Vietnamese census handbook.
• People complained that the Census Bureau staff officers have stopped community organizations from helping people fill out the census questionnaire. According to AALDEF, as long as people are actively seeking assistance, community organizations' personnel should be able to help fill out the form.
• AALDEF worries that the Census has been unable to recruit enough bilingual employees when data indicate that although the Asian population was sent more than enough applications most of them cannot fill them out on their own.
• The Census web site is not updated with enough frequency and, AALDEF pointed out, the Census provided information on the nearest assistance centers and Be Counted Sites two weeks after issuing the questionnaire form. It also complained on the difficulty of navigating the site.
• AALDEF criticized that the Census Bureau's publicity is not effective; the Bureau spent a lot of money to design a number of Asian-theme posters, many with a food theme, but they failed to underscore the importance of participating in the count.
• Some of the translations of the questionnaire have serious errors. For example, in the Korean questionnaire "county" is incorrectly translated as "state."
• Some community questionnaire assistance centers have no translation capacity. There were complaints that at some centers, Korean and Tagalog translators cannot even help the seniors to translate their names.
• Many community agencies are still complaining that the Census Bureau did not advertise heavily on the issue of the "protection of privacy" regarding the information provided.
