Counting Us In
It must have been two years after my family and I came to the United States. At that point, my mother worked long, long hours at a local restaurant. Most of the time, it was just my sister and me in our ground floor abode in the suburbs of New York City. Before 5pm, it was me watching Kids WB on our giant CRT television while I did my worksheets. After 5pm, my sister would either turn on VH1 or pop in a VHS of a Korean television drama.
Living on the ground floor, we hardly got any foot traffic from people we didn’t know. Jehovah’s Witnesses and door-to-door salespeople went straight to our upstairs neighbors whose door actually faced the street. On Halloween, maybe we’d get a particularly adventurous trick-or-treater who would be rewarded with ginger candy for their adventurous trek to our side door. We didn’t even have a doorbell!
On that late afternoon in April, we heard knocks on our door. Who could it have been? Neither my sister nor I were expecting any friends to come over. The television and the lights were on — there was no pretending that we weren’t home. We didn’t have a peephole, so we had no clue who was on the other side of our door. My sister asked who was on the other side of the door — in Korean. The voice on the other side of the door asked if our parents were home — in English.
Nobody would ever ask for our parents in the plural. At that point, we knew that it was a stranger and we should be alarmed. It hadn’t fully dawned on me yet as a sixth grader, but my sister knew that as undocumented immigrants, the person on the other side of the door could rip our family apart. With a little back and forth between my sister and this strange woman on the other side of the door, we figured out what this woman wanted: she wanted to ask us some questions. After my sister’s adamant declaration saying that we don’t open our doors to strangers, the woman met us halfway and asked if she could slide the questionnaire underneath our door for us to fill out.
That questionnaire was Census 2000. My family’s story with the Census 2000 goes to show how hard it is to enumerate to immigrant communities.
There’s a slew of factors that work against counting immigrant communities. The most obvious one is that many immigrant communities have a heavy proportion of Limited English Proficient individuals. One estimate states that nearly one in three Asian Americans whose first language isn’t English are Limited English Proficient. It also could be that immigrants, especially women, have odd working hours, and are hard to reach. Census workers can just gloss over families like mine who live basement/ground-floor units and ignore those who have nontraditional living arrangements.
The Trump Administration’s Department of Commerce plans to include a question asking immigration status for the upcoming 2020 Census. Instead of making the Census more accessible to all those who call America home, this is a nefarious act to further drive the immigrant communities into the shadows. Furthermore, the decreased rate of census participation is punitive to the political representation of immigrant-heavy regions around the country. Why should Missoula, Montana have better political representation than San Gabriel Valley and Edison, New Jersey just because it has less immigrants?
America’s census has a checkered history when it comes to determining how to count who lives here and what it had done with the data. Up until Reconstruction, the very infamous Three-Fifth Compromise counted the enslaved as less than a human being so that slaveowners can have better political representation. Any choice resembling Native American didn’t appear until the 1870s. In 1943, the Census bureau complied with the War Department’s request for the list of Japanese Americans.
The proposed change is a direct attack on the immigrant community, and very specifically the Asian American community. With nearly one in five Asian Americans living in census tracts considered “hard to count,” must demand this: count us in.
