Opinions mixed on possible census changes
As President Joe Biden’s administration continues its push to modify how the U.S. Census Bureau collects data on ethnicity and race, some Texas demography experts have mixed opinions about the proposal.
The potential changes would do away with Latinos having to choose both an ethnic identity and race when responding to the census and would recognize Middle Eastern and North African as distinct ethnicities instead of just “white.”
Jeronimo Cortina, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said he has concerns about how information collected via the potential changes could affect policymakers trying to serve certain communities and researchers such as himself.
“The quality of the data is going to be murkier if this goes into effect,” he said. “It’s a very tricky policy.”
This is because the division between race and ethnicity has for decades been the standard in the federal government’s approach to measuring its Latino population, he added.
Beginning in 1970, the census started asking respondents whether they originated or descended from areas such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba and Central or South America. By the 2000s, this evolved into specifically asking whether or not they were Spanish, Hispanic or Latino. Regardless, each decennial census since then has kept questions about ethnicity and race separate.
Changing how that information is gathered in the census and other data collection can have widespread effects, Cortina said.
“When you are changing the measurement of such groups, that could have implications for public policy in the future
until the data achieves a steady state,” which could take years, he said.
Lloyd Potter, the Texas state demographer and a longtime University of Texas at San Antonio professor, agreed that there could be challenges but said similar alterations have been made to the census before.
“When you look at historic comparisons, that creates problems,” he said. “But that’s nothing new. The Census Bureau has changed how it records race and ethnicity multiple times over the years.”
The biggest issues could arise when analysts or policymakers need to tabulate things such as fertility or mortality rates, he added.
These potential obstacles are worth it if they allow Latinos and others to have clearer options that better reflect their identities, said research scientist Gabriela Sánchez-Soto of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
She’s found that the twopronged questioning can be confusing for many people and could even lead to some ignoring the question altogether.
“This should actually be very useful in … allowing us to represent people in the way they want to be represented or in a way that is more understandable to them,” Sánchez-Soto said.
Another issue with the current approach is that many Latinos and other respondents identify themselves as “some other race” instead of selecting one of the categories listed on the questionnaire.
In the 2020 census, more than 1 in 7 people, including 45 million Latinos, did just that, and it led to “some other race” becoming the second-most common response in the country behind “white.”
“You end up in a big bucket with a lot of people,” SánchezSoto said. “If I am an organization trying to (use census data), you don’t quite know what to do with that.”
The proposed changes would help solve that issue, she added.
Although she welcomes the potential changes, the research scientist acknowledged that it may still take a while for these changes to become official.
The Biden administration said in a statement that it is still in the process of collecting written comments from the public and that the completed revisions are not expected until at least summer 2024.
“There’s still time to go,” Sánchez-Soto said. “These kinds of things take a while.”