Chinatown and Asians in Boston showing a low response rate
If you haven’t responded to the 2020 Census questionnaire, then you could hear a knock on your door this month. The deadline for completing the U.S. Census Bureau questionnaire was extended three months because of the Covid-19 pandemic to Oct. 31, but that date has been cut back a month, and now will end Sept. 30.
However, the Census Bureau is not waiting for households to voluntarily participate; it’s go-time for them to get household members to respond in communities where the numbers are low – like Chinatown.
The challenge for census trackers is to get the most historically difficult groups to respond, which in the inner cities includes immigrants, homeless people, and renters. In the 2010 Census, millions of people were omitted from the census because they did not participate.
Lewis Liu, who is originally from Guangzhou, China, is the Supervisory Partnership Specialist for the New York Regional Census Center, responsible for the Chinese community. He is also fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese and was hired in October of last year for his new role to oversee the census work in Chinese and Asian communities. Liu spoke to Sampan in a phone interview. He said that in Boston more than 120 bilingual English and Chinese speaking (both mandarin and Cantonese) census takers are ready to begin door-to-door work.
For the U.S. as a whole, the census count has reported a 62.6 percent response rate, amounting to 92.5 million households, online, by phone, or by mail. The Massachusetts response rate as of July 26 was 64.6 percent, two percentage points better than the national average, and ranks 20th out of 50 states. Boston’s response rate was 52.9 percent. Within the country, cities with more than 500,000 populations, Boston ranks 35th out of 39 cities.
Boston census tract for Chinatown is 51.8 percent, lower than the City of Boston as a whole. As of July 1, 2019, 692,600 are the population base of Boston, and the Asian community represents 9.6 percent, but there’s no specific breakdown of the different Asian groups.
One of the questions in the census allows for ethnicity to be identified. The self-identifying question has been asked since the 2000 census. The same question appears on the American Committee Survey, a random survey sent out every year.
“We encourage everyone to self-identify on a voluntary basis,” Liu said. “We need to comply with the Civil Rights Act. So we want to make sure that all communities are fairly represented because those numbers will be used for redistricting. The census data will be presented to Congress and all the states. Especially in the states, they will use the data for redistricting purposes.”
He added that federal funds are also affected by the census data and how federal money will be allocated around the country in individual states and cities. As for the questionnaire itself, the questions are straightforward and quick to answer.
“Every household, we ask for the primary person for the household to answer the questionnaire,” Liu said. “The first question would be: How many people live in this household? And then the second question is of the ownership of this household; do you live here at this address? Do you own it or are you renting it, or is somebody providing it for free? Then the next question is for your phone number, sometimes for quality assurance purpose we may call back to make sure all the questions are answered properly. And then the next question we ask the primary person’s name, gender, date of birth. And then the next question is whether you are Hispanic: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Columbian, Guatemala, etc. And the next question is for race, and you can either enter white, black Native American, or Alaska. For Asians, we have Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Asian Indian, Japanese. And we provide spaces for anyone to write-in if that person does not see anything in the check box.”
As for information gathered by the Census Bureau, no personal data can be disclosed to other federal agencies as stated under Article 13 of U.S. federal law. Liu stressed that no questions such as citizenship status, what kind of passport the individual holds, credit card or bank accounts, language spoken, income earned, how long someone has lived in the country, none of these questions will be asked. Last year the Supreme Court ruled that no question can be asked in the census regarding citizenship.
Census takers will begin door-to-door work on Aug. 11 in Boston. Every census taker will have a photo badge, clearly identifying them, and a bag with a Census Bureau local name on it. And because of the coronavirus pandemic, all census takers will remain outside and stay six feet away, and wear a mask. They will also be using an iPad to fill out the questionnaire, which takes between 5-10 minutes. Because the Census Bureau is not a law enforcement agency, they can only request that the household member participate as mandated by the Constitution.
“It’s for their own benefit and also for the community, for the city, and state,” Liu stressed. “It boils down to political representation and also the federal spending; hundreds of billions of dollars of federal spending for the next ten year. Ten minutes for the next ten years, that’s the message we want to communicate to all members in every community. Ten minutes of your time for the next ten years is for yourself, for your family, for your children, for your community, and for your city.”
