The Manhattan Times

Stand up and be counted: issues surrounding the 2010 census

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series or articles exploring next year’s census and how it will affect the population of Washington Heights and Inwood.

by Adam Garrett-Clark

Next spring, residents of Northern Manhattan, and the entire country, will receive a government questionnaire in their mailboxes.

As mandated by the U.S. Constitution, every ten years the government makes a full head count of the country and its territories primarily to determine the distribution of members of the House of Representatives.

The resulting tabulation also influences where millions of dollars in federal and state money are spent and sets the landscape for political decisions over the next decade. Some would say the next nine months leading up to and following census day, on April 1, 2010, are crucial.

As immigrant communities with a large number of residents living invisibly off the books, Washington Heights and Inwood are always at risk of producing distorted numbers. Although all the census data that is collected is kept confidential, and it is a federal crime for census workers to share respondents’ personal information with other government agencies, many immigrants – both legal and otherwise – fear retribution from filling out the questionnaire.

Still, ten years ago in the 2000 census, the region encompassed by Community Board 12 had the highest response rate in the city. Northern Manhattan received a response from Sixty-six percent of the forms that were mailed out according to former Director of the Washington Heights local census office, Aldrin Bonilla.

Part of that high response rate 10 years ago could be attributed to the local census office on W. 183rd Street that was up and running by this time.

Currently there is only one office open for all of Manhattan, and it’s located downtown.

According to New York regional census center media specialist Yolanda Finley, the borough will eventually have four offices, but the exact locations and dates they will open are still being worked out. According to the current Manhattan office the nearest office will likely be in Harlem.

Washington Heights and Inwood, a Latino center in the most populated city in the country, finds itself in the middle of a national story line.

Based on the numbers collected from the last census, it has been projected that by 2042 whites will no longer make up the majority of the U.S. population, partly because the Hispanic population is expected to triple. These changing dynamics have prompted right-wing immigration hardliners to call for the exclusion of illegal immigrants from participating in the count. And ironically they are being joined by a few prominent Latino religious leaders, who have called for a national boycott of the 2010 census out of protest of current immigration policy.

With political power and resources at stake, many national Hispanic organizations are working to counter that message. On Oct. 1 Ya Es Hora, a national Latino political organization, began a series of public service announcements in major Spanish language media aiming to increase the response rate.

This year’s census will have some changes that may improve the accuracy of the count in Northern Manhattan.

The questionnaire will be shorter, asking only basic questions, and for the first time in its history there will be a Spanish version.

After April 1, census workers go door to door to homes that failed to respond to the mailed questionnaire. These census workers are usually hired within the community, providing temporary employment during the spring and the summer.

However it is unclear how many of those census jobs are still up for grabs as Finley indicated that the initial hiring phase last spring may provide enough candidates for the jobs that are left.

How all these issues play out in the next year will no doubt influence how Northern Manhattan is counted, and how the national family portrait will look after it is taken.

The Manhattan Times is the bilingual newspaper of Washington Heights and Inwood.