Census Bureau Decides to Hire Noncitizens

In an unprecedented move, the Census Bureau has temporarily revised its policy to allow noncitizens to be hired as temporary census workers, a crucial move in cities such as Los Angeles where ethnically diverse communities need bilingual assistance.

Ken Ellwanger, deputy regional director for the U.S. Census Bureau, said in a news conference Thursday that the temporary waiver will help his agency tap into a bigger pool of applicants. From 20,000 to 30,000 temporary census workers will be hired in the region, which spans Southern California north to Monterey and includes the state of Hawaii.

The waiver, issued a week ago by U.S. Commerce Secretary William M. Daley, allows the Census Bureau to bypass its policy preference for hiring citizens as temporary workers.

The federal government only hires citizens for its full-time jobs and had used that policy to include its temporary workers, said Bill Baron, deputy director for the Census Bureau in Washington, D.C.

“For the first time our policy will be, if you are eligible to work in the United States, you are eligible to work on the U.S. census,” Baron said. “For certain regions, this policy is critically important. Southern California is one of those.”

To complete the enormous task of the census, staged every 10 years, the Census Bureau needs to hire a bigger pool of workers, including more that are bilingual, Baron said. Nationwide, the 2000 census will require 850,000 workers, he said.

Legal advocates who work in the Latino and Asian communities and who have recently lobbied for the hiring waiver applauded the action, saying it will help ensure a better census count.

California had the highest undercount of any state in the last census in 1990; an estimated 834,516 people were missed.

Nationwide, the 1990 census missed 5% of Latinos, 4.4% of African Americans, 2.3% of Asians and Pacific Islanders and 12.2% of Native Americans on reservations.

Although the census counts all residents, regardless of citizenship and residency status, the census bureau had perennially bypassed a good resource of census workers who understand their communities, said Louisa Ollague, regional census director for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Many communities with large numbers of new Latino immigrants--be it Pico-Union near downtown or Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley--are home to large numbers of legal residents who are not citizens, Ollague said.

“Those are the people who know the community. They know the converted garages, they know the apartments that have one or more families,” she said.

In some Asian and Pacific Islander communities--such as the Cambodian, Hmong and Laotian--it’s hard to find a large pool of bilingual workers who are also citizens, said Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California.

“All of these people are legally residing here and are able to work here, so there’s no problem with their work or immigration status,” Kwoh said. “There aren’t enough U.S. citizens with those language skills who could apply for those jobs, so it’s not taking jobs away. In reality, everyone wins on this and the census gets a better count.”

Ellwanger, who discussed the waiver at a downtown meeting of the Asian Media Census Alliance, said his agency has always had trouble enlisting enough workers who are proficient in different languages.

His agency has already received about 50,000 to 60,000 job applications, but he said he would like to receive at least twice as many additional applicants.

“Think about it, we just heard in 1999 we can finally allow noncitizens to participate in the census,” said Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, who spoke at the Asian media alliance meeting.

“We’ve not recruited enough people from these communities,” he said. “Our failure to do that in 1990 along with the failure to recruit ethnic minorities and language proficient census counters is one reason for the undercount.”