Sunday, March 21, 2010
McClatchy Newspapers
FORT WORTH, Texas
The anti-government sentiment that sparked the tea-party movement is brewing a backlash of sorts against the coming census by people who say it asks too many questions and intrudes on their privacy.
Such census resisters say the Constitution empowers the Census Bureau only to count the number of people in a household. They say that’s the only inquiry they’ll respond to when the 10-question census forms are mailed to 130 million households in mid-March.
Gabriel Sanchez, the Dallas-based regional census director, says the claim is wrong.
“The truth is, when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they gave Congress the power to determine how the census is conducted. The U.S. Supreme Court has again and again upheld how the Census Bureau conducts the census,” Sanchez said.
The 2010 form is the shortest in modern history, he said, and asks only simple questions such as age, gender, ethnicity and whether a dwelling is owned or rented.
State Demographer Karl Eschbach says that “independent streaks” have come and gone over the years but that the current fears seem misplaced.
“It’s kind of a peculiar concern in an age in which so much is being collected about us by folks other than the government. These are fairly benign questions,” said Eschbach, a professor and health researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, noting that the first census, in 1790, asked six questions.
“Clearly, everyone’s ability to monitor us has gone way up,” he said. “Private industry can track the keystrokes on your computer. You’ve got people making databanks of your every consumer purchase, and you are worried about the government knowing how you classify yourself by race and ethnicity for purposes of allocation of funds?”
Many of the concerns appear linked to the American Community Survey, a much more extensive census questionnaire sent to 75,000 households nationwide each month.
The survey, Sanchez said, is an important tool for local planners, who need to know detailed information such as how many toilets are in a home to determine the need for sewage facilities. Questions on commute times help communities identify transportation needs, he said.
Although many census holdouts say they resent the intrusiveness and growth of government, if they don’t fill out the forms, they’ll be visited by a census worker. That will increase the cost of the census, Sanchez said. The Census Bureau projects a 70 percent return rate on the forms, but every 1 percent of noncompliance adds $85 million to the cost, he said.
For both the 10-question form and the community survey, census workers will visit nonresponsive households up to seven times, Sanchez said. And if that doesn’t work, the enumerators will contact neighbors for the data.
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