When the founding fathers wrote the Constitution, the first thing they set up was the House of Representatives – and in order to divvy up the seats fairly, they ordered up a census within three years (1790) and every 10 years after that.
The 22nd U.S. census is underway right now, and there is more at stake than just the number of Representatives New York will have when it’s done, according to William M. Harfmann, area manager for the New York Region Census Center.
“Approximately $435 billion in federal money is divided up each year, based on [census] counts,” Harfmann pointed out. “Moreover, there are issues of state and local representation, allocation of educational and social resources that all require accurate census information,” he said.
For this reason, in addition to mailing out millions of questionnaires, the Census Bureau will be hiring enumerators – the official title for census takers – and they are still looking for them.
“We hire from the community for each community,” Harfmann said, revealing that Queens is divided up among four offices, each of which will require 900 to 1,100 enumerators. “Who better to go out and do the interviews than someone you might have even seen at the store?”
Any U.S. citizen 18 years or older who passes a simple test qualifies. “Veterans get a preference,” Harfmann said, “but if you have proof of citizenship, the whole process takes about 90 minutes.”
Census officials, however, are still trying to get everyone to mail in the short-form questionnaire. “Ten questions in 10 minutes,” Harfmann said, revealing that the cost of physically enumerating a census is from $70 to $90 per household.
It is the issue of confidentiality that seems to worry people, especially older and undocumented persons. “We don’t care who you are or where you come from,” he insisted, “All we want to know is where you live.”
“Confidentiality is the cornerstone of the census,” Harfman said, noting that it is a serious federal felony to divulge individual census information.
They are so sensitive about it that the location of the processing offices is not publicized, according to Nan Min, who runs the northeast Queens office. “We don’t want to have any undue influence on our operation,” Min said, explaining that the census takers don’t interact with her staff of 60 to 80 processors.
Min, Korean by birth and raised in Brazil before settling in Bayside, is fluent in Korean, Portuguese and Spanish – and needs census takers fluent in all the languages found here. “That’s a lot,” she said with a smile.
As of the last tabulation before the mailing deadline of Thursday, April 1, Queens mail-in response was at 34 percent, below the state average of 45 percent. “We’ll wait for a while for the mail to come in, but we have to be out of the field by the end of June,” Harfman said, noting that the tabulations have to be on President Obama’s desk by December 31.
Information about the census is available in multiple languages at the web site https://2010.census.gov.
