January 09, 2010 9:16 AM

Are immigrants skeptical of the census?

By DENA BUNIS
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
dbunis@ocregister.comStory Highlights

Like income tax and voting you'd think it would be a no brainer that once a decade we'd all be willing to take a few minutes and fill out the U.S. Census form.

If that were true the bureau wouldn't have just embarked on a $130 million kickoff publicity campaign and wouldn't be hiring about 700,000 people nationwide who will fan out and track down folks who don't send their forms back.

The conventional wisdom is that suburban counties like Orange are easy places to count. It's the cities that have historically been undercounted. But the large Hispanic and Asian communities are posing a big challenge to census takers nationwide.

The big question: Will undocumented immigrants in particular have faith that filling out the census form won't lead to a knock on the door from a federal immigration official?

Commerce Department officials (the Census Bureau is part of this department) are stressing that the information people put on their shorter-than-ever questionnaire this year will not be shared with any other government agency. And there's no history of people being rounded up during census time.

But the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for immigration enforcement, is being a little circumspect about just how it will act during the heavy census- taking period, from mid-March until April 1, Census Day.

I asked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's chief spokesman Matt Chandler what assurances undocumented immigrants have that the information from the census won't be used to round them up.

Here's his response:

"DHS supports a thorough and accurate count of our population. All the information the Census Bureau collects is protected by law – it is not shared with any other agency.

"As the Commerce Department has made clear, neither the Commerce Department nor the Census Bureau will ask DHS to refrain from exercising our lawful authority. We are focused on smart, effective immigration enforcement that focuses first on those dangerous criminal aliens who present the greatest risk to the security of our communities, not sweeps or raids to target undocumented immigrants indiscriminately."

That's not the way Doris Meissner handled it when she was INS commissioner during the 2000 census.

"We definitely went further than what I'm hearing from this administration thus far,'' Meissner told me. Meissner said the way she remembers it she made it clear that while her agency would continue to do serious criminal enforcement, other routine operations and enforcement activities would be suspended during the two weeks leading up to Census Day.

Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, understands why Napolitano is not likely to go as far.

"I think politically they feel more vulnerable and that they may even believe that by going any further they would send signals that would embolden serious criminals and possibly terrorists."

Factor in the Christmas Day attempted terrorism incident and this is no time for the Obama administration to be letting down its guard.

Rep. Ed Royce doesn't think any slack should be given because of the census.

Of course Royce, who has been critical of the Bush and now Obama administration's efforts at immigrant enforcement, said if federal officials had been doing their jobs there would be no issue of how to count millions of illegal immigrations.

"I think our posture should be full enforcement to the extent of the law 365 days a year, not backing off now or on any day," Royce said.

Meissner believes that the nation's foreign born population – both legal and illegal – is much more savvy, that there's better communication within immigrant communities and that there is a real concerted effort going on to get these groups counted.

The challenges are different for different groups.

Beyond the fear that the undocumented have of being discovered, legal immigrants are also often reluctant to fill out the census forms, explained Georgeann Lovett, who is the Diocese of Orange's point person on justice issues and on the census.

"The immigrants who are here legally, are unsure of our legal system, unsure what the census means,'' she said. "They want to know why are they taking our names and where we live and how many people are in our house?''

Many in these communities are poor and multiple families live in one apartment or home. They may be concerned, she said, that their landlord would find out that more people are living in the house than are supposed to and they might get evicted.

"For us at the Diocese we feel this is a justice issue,'' Lovett said. "We need to have a full count of the people so we can ensure that we in California, especially in Orange County, get our fair share of federal funds to help us with the kind of challenges we have,'' she said, especially in such areas as health care and education.

Most people know that the census count, which is mandated by the U.S. Constitution, is used to determine how many congressional districts each state gets. What some may not realize is that about $400 billion a year in federal funds are distributed around the country based on population. And those figures come from the census.

The Diocese is asking all 60 parishes in Orange County to get involved. They can sign up to partner with the census and get posters for their churches and even get a census worker to be on site for several weekends during peak census time to answer questions and help people fill out forms.

With 1.2 million Catholics in the Diocese- about one-third of the county's population – Lovett believes they can make a difference.

"Many people trust the church,'' she said, and if the Diocese is strongly in favor of parishioners' participation hopefully it will make them feel it's safe to fill the forms out.

Another major ethnic group in Orange County has other concerns about the census.

This is the second census in a row that Nhi Ho has worked for the census to help get a full count in the Vietnamese Community

Vietnamese-Americans have an inherent distrust of government, Ho explains, especially when it comes to the census. In Vietnam, the census was used by the government to track down people suspected of being dissidents.

Ho is working with local Vietnamese leaders and the media in the community to get the word out. He's already been working for two years to prepare for this count.

In both communities census workers are also turning to the younger generation.

They're going to schools and college campuses to talk to young people, asking them to talk to their parents about how important it is to make sure everyone is counted.

We'll all start seeing census forms in our mailboxes in March and they're due back by April 1. Then starting in May, the census takers will be going door-to-door around the country to catch up to people who haven't been counted.

The reapportionment count is due to President Barack Obama by the end of the year.

We'll be watching.

Bunis is the Register's Washington bureau chief.

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/cens ... count.html