‘Shortchanging every Latino’
Census change could mean big undercount in places like Valley
Census experts and advocates warn that the Trump administration’s decision to end the decennial count a month earlier than expected will result in a dramatic undercount of Black and Latino communities across the country, which could have grave effects on federal funding and political representation in their neighborhoods.
They point in particular to alarmingly low response rates in places such as the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and the Bronx in New York, where the coronavirus pandemic already had interrupted outreach in some of the country’s hardest-to-count census tracts.
Several experts said they’re especially worried about the Latino count in Texas, where more than a dozen Latino-heavy counties have the lowest participation rates in the country.
The overall self-response rate in Texas so far is 58 percent, compared with 64 percent by this point in 2010, said Katie Martin Lightfoot, who coordinates the grass-roots Texas Counts campaign, an informal committee that brings together local leaders and census organizers across the state. But as few as 37 percent of households have responded in some counties in the Valley.
One in four Texans live in hardto-count areas where poverty, rural locations and a lack of internet connections drive down census participation, Martin said.
Data shows that Latinos in particular have the lowest response rate statewide. Experts on her team have estimated that even a 1 percent undercount would lead to a loss of $300 million per year for the next decade.
In some ways, the deck already was stacked for a potential undercount there. While other states dedicate tens of millions of dollars to census outreach efforts meant to boost the count, the Texas Legislature provided no funding at all. That left the task of encouraging participation up to local philanthropies and nonprofits, Martin said.
“Think about COVID-19 and the pandemic and how much we’re relying on these resources now. And people are still going to need those services, and that burden will fall on the state and the local governments,” she said.
National nonprofits and community activists are putting together urgent persuasion campaigns in an attempt to cram three months of work into two — driving through neighborhoods with bullhorns taped to vehicles, pouring funds into geotagged digital advertising, and phone-banking.
“We’re in the middle of a global pandemic, and they might be shortchanging every Latino community for 10 years to come. This is cruel,” said Lizette Escobedo, who leads the census program for NALEO Educational Fund, a nonpartisan Latino rights organization.
The census represents an important fault line in the battle over structural racism and equity, with high stakes.
It dictates the allocation of federal dollars and influences everything from infrastructure investments to education programs such as free and reduced lunch to public health-care spending. The data also is used when deciding the boundaries of legislative districts.
People who don’t self-report their information usually are visited by a Census Bureau worker. Because of delays caused by the pandemic, the federal government earlier this year extended the deadline for in-person follow-up, from midAugust to Oct. 31. But the administration abruptly announced last week that it would require data collection to end by Sept. 30 instead.
By law, the final census count must be delivered to the president by Dec. 31 of the year it takes place. Census Bureau officials have said the shortened deadline is part of an effort to meet that requirement.
The bureau declined to comment about the risk of undercounting communities of color, but issued a statement announcing it would hire more workers to achieve a complete count.
Escobedo and others said they believe the decision was a desire to suppress the political power of communities of color, which traditionally vote Democratic.
Even in non-pandemic times, the likeliest communities to be undercounted are typically also the most marginalized in the country, said Diana Elliott, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
“If certain areas are not represented with their full accurate count, that means their funding will be diminished as well,” Elliott said. “I think, for example, of the Rio Grande Valley. That area of Texas will get less money than, say, the suburbs of Dallas. And that’s not really a fair and equitable distribution of resources.”