Asian American and Pacific Islander activists are urging the U.S. Census Bureau to reconsider a proposal to reduce categorization of ethnic subgroups for the 2020 census, calling it a barrier to accurate data collection.
“Let’s face it, not all Asians are Chinese, and the data collected by the census should reflect a growing diverse and ethnic population,” said Kimlee Sureemee, policy coordinator at Asian Services in Action.
The census aims to count every person in the country every ten years, cataloging data on income, race, ethnicity, education household size and more.
Under the current two-question system, an Asian American skips past the relatively simpler white, black and Native American racial identities.
[caption id=”attachment_7916" align=”alignleft” width=”300"]
Each dot on the map represents 500 residents. Green dots represent those who self-identified as Asian. (Courtesy Eric Fisher via Flickr Creative Commons.)[/caption]
She would look through nine AAPI ethnicity options and check off hers: Indian, Japanese, Native Hawaiian, Chinese, Korean, Guamanian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Samoan. If she were, say, Thai or Cambodian, she would be prompted to write this in under “Other Asian.”
If the proposal is accepted, the census will no longer offer checkboxes for specific ethnic subgroups.
Activists fear the respondent in 2020 might have to first check “Asian,” then manually write in “Vietnamese” on a separate fill-in blank. Even this option might only be available to those who submit the survey online — which has activists concerned for the lower-income and elderly AAPI populations.
Terry Ao Minnis, who directs census programs at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, called this suggested change “particularly troubling.”
It could frustrate their ability to collect detailed data on the AAPI population, which she said is “so critical for our ability to understand and properly address the concerns and needs of our community.”
By 2017, the Bureau will send their proposed census design to Congress.
Meanwhile, activists are urging them to instead increase the number of checkboxes, according to a letter to the Census Bureau signed by AAJC and well over 100 other other organizations and academics.
Removing checkboxes led to the lowest detail in Asian American race reporting than any other format tested in the Census Bureau’s 2010 Alternate Questionnaire Experiment. And removing ethnic subgroups had similarly lower results in the 2005 National Census Test.
Besides better survey methodology, activists are also urging the Bureau to provide language assistance to Asian Americans with limited English proficiency to ensure representative numbers.
Knowing the political power held in census data, activists are pushing for full representation.
The numbers are used to formulate local funding from government agencies, distribute congressional seats and determine if a district must translate election ballots under the Voting Rights Act.
With minority immigration a driving force for redistricting after the 2010 census, it’s important to count and characterize people of color and immigrants, said C.N. Le, director of the Asian & Asian American Studies Certificate Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
The petitioners also asked that Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander options be clearly marked as distinct from Asian options to encourage detailed race reporting.
“The data we have is never enough,” Sureemee said. “The problem is, the data is sometimes inaccurately recorded, or the residents fill out the census not as directed. While there has been improvement fixing the margin of error for Asians over the years, there is still room for improvement.”
From divorce rates to average income, numbers vary vastly between Asian populations. It’s vital to recognize the different needs of Southeast Asians, who have a roughly 50-year history in the U.S., versus Asians who have been here for 200 years, said Tong Thao, a civil rights fellow at the Organization of Chinese Americans.
“It comes down to how different ethnic groups within Asia Pacific America experience the American story,” Thao said.
But when, as the Census Bureau has proposed, the data on different groups are aggregated together, Thao said it becomes “difficult to highlight the individual needs of each population.”
Sureemee said precise and disaggregated data is vital to “see where there are gaps, and how we can improve the standard of living for ethnic group.”
The issue is bigger than the number of checkboxes. Experts say census data can become a reference point for society.
“Census surveys provide a guideline within local states about how much detail to collect, in terms of ethnicity groups,” said Thao. “If local schools are able to use those templates to align the data they collect with those of the census, it would improve how we understand students within those states.”
If the data finds a large population of Southeast Asian youth in a community, it becomes easier to recognize the need to allocate different education resources there, he said.
Le said more representative census data helps both legislators and Asian Americans themselves to understand the power of the rapidly-growing population, on both local and national levels, entering mainstream U.S. society.
“Many of them are doing well, they have nice jobs working as doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc.,” said Le. “But the next step is ensuring their community has political power.”
Featured photo courtesy of Eric Langhorst via Flickr Creative Commons.
