Recent victories by Chinese candidates are helping the census drive this year, but New York’s Chinese community has already seen how the census count has helped to shape its political power in bitter and joyful ways.
A Bloomberg administration official says the number of New Yorkers who have mailed back their completed census forms “is horribly low right now.”
Fi2W launches its project on the Census with a radio piece and a live conversation on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show on hard-to-reach immigrant households.
The Census Bureau has worked to convince immigrants that taking part in the 2010 count is in their best interest. But warnings that they will go undercounted persist.
The biggest advertising campaign of the new year isn’t selling cars, beer or burgers. The $340-million effort, which made its debut with a TV spot on the Golden Globe Awards last Sunday, encourages everyone in the U.S. to be counted in this year’s census.
Against an unsettling background of immigration raids and deportations, the U.S. Census Bureau expects to have a hard time convincing close to 12 million undocumented immigrants to take part in its population count next year.
From left: NYC immigrant affairs commissioner Guillermo Linares, NYC Census 2010 director Stacey Cumberbatch, and NY Community Media Alliance director Juana Ponce de Leon. (Photo: Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska.)
Census representatives made a plea to New York ethnic journalists to help them spread the message that every New Yorker will benefit from the 2010 Census, even undocumented immigrants. City officials and immigrant organizations supported the initiative, during a press briefing held Tuesday at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
“Census data determine the number of delegates the city gets in Congress and the State Legislature, as well as the size of each of our 51 City Council districts,” said Stacey Cumberbatch, New York City director for Census 2010. “But they also determine how much federal funding New York City gets each year. This money funds things like health care, housing, education or senior services.”
Cumberbatch told the few dozen journalists at the briefing that in 2007 New York City got $22 billion (or $2,700 per person) to fund its various programs. That amount was calculated based on Census data using a simple equation: the more people counted, the more funding appropriated.
As census workers hit the streets across the country to start verifying addresses in preparation for next year’s head count, the chair of a key House subcommittee is urging the government to relax enforcement of immigration laws to ensure that minorities and the undocumented are not undercounted on April 1, 2010.
Immigration restrictionists and conservatives are incensed at the Census Bureau’s efforts to count “all illegal aliens in 2010.”
The 2010 Census is becoming yet another battleground in the immigration reform wars.
U.S. Rep. William Clay (D.-Mo.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Archives, “said he plans to ask the Obama administration to suspend immigration raids over the next year,” Fox News reported. “He wants the raids put on hold so illegal immigrants don’t worry that sharing accurate information with Census workers could somehow expose them to punishment, even deportation.”
Clay said in a recent news release that the last Census “missed 3 million Americans. Many of them were African American or Hispanic, most were poor, and all of them deserved to be counted.
“…The Census is really about three things: information, federal funding, and proper political representation,” Clay added. “When we miss any American, we deprive his or her community of all three of those precious resources. Every American counts, and every American deserves to be counted.”
As we reported previously, the Census Bureau has already started reaching out to immigrant communities to ensure an accurate count. The acting director of the Census Bureau, Thomas Mesenbourg, told conservative news site CNSNews.com that the agency intends to count “every (U.S.) resident whether they’re documented, undocumented, whether they are citizens or non-citizens.”
“This means,” wrote CNSNews.com’s Nicholas Ballasy, “that a state harboring more illegal aliens can gain more House seats as long as the Census Bureau finds the illegal aliens and counts them. This also means that the illegal alien population resident in the United States during a census year has the potential to alter the regional and philosophical balance of power in Congress.” (more…)
