Census estimates show 2000 count missed 509,000 Californians
Saturday December 07, 2002
By JUSTIN PRITCHARD
Associated Press Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) More than half a million Californians the
majority of them Hispanics were left out of the 2000 U.S. Census,
according to new estimates released under a court order.
That undercount could have cost California billions in federal
funding.
The new estimate of California's population, 34,380,660
residents, is 509,000 people more than the official count released
last year.
The official count reflected the number of people census workers
located when they fanned out in the spring of 2000 by the
bureau's own admission, not every Californian. Friday's data
represented an estimate of the total number they would have tallied
if they actually talked to everyone.
Of the 509,000 missed people, about 298,000 were Hispanic.
In Los Angeles County alone, Hispanics accounted for two-thirds
of the 171,000 people who weren't counted. In Fresno County,
three-quarters of the 13,300 people who weren't counted were
Hispanic.
``Despite the strong push for Hispanic census participation,
undercount has lead to their under-representation in most of
California,'' said Bill Frey, a demographer at the Milken Institute
of Santa Monica.
There are street-level reasons for this. Minorities tend to be
poorer and thus live more transient lives in apartments making
them harder to track down. Also, some undocumented immigrants may
shy away from filling out their forms, though it did not ask about
legal status.
``We know the census undercounts Hispanics, we know it
undercounts blacks. It undercounts whites less, probably overcounts
them in some cases,'' Frey said. ``To the extent federal programs
are directed to minorities, this is a real concern.''
Last year, the federal government decided to use the unadjusted
count in funding formulas for about $185 billion worth of programs
running from housing block grants to Medicaid to public school
funding.
Census officials have called the 2000 count among the most
accurate ever and cautioned that the statistically adjusted numbers
are flawed and are of little value.
During the 1990s, California lost out on $2.2 billion in federal
funding based on the undercount from the 1990 census, according to
the U.S. General Accounting Office. It appears that this time
again, California would have been better off under the adjusted
count.
The new data broke down the 509,000-person undercount along all
racial lines.
Among the 211,000 undercounted non-Hispanics, 91,000 were white;
61,000 were black; 34,000 were Asian; 6,000 were American Indian;
and 5,100 were Pacific Islander. The other 13,000 were multiracial.
Overall, census counters catalogued about 1.5 percent fewer
people than California's actual population. That exceeded the 1.2
percent estimated undercount nationally.
In general, states that are either rural or have large minority
populations registered the largest undercounts California has
both characteristics. Counters may have missed thousands of people
in Los Angeles' inner city but they also failed to find 5,300
blacks in Alameda County and 2,500 whites in sparsely populated
Butte County.
The bureau reluctantly released the data based on a San
Francisco federal court's order. Opponents of releasing the
adjusted numbers, mainly Republicans, have said the complicated
statistical methods used to determine the undercount would simply
add more error into the results.
The new data provided from the Census Bureau was based on
research done in March 2001. Bureau officials said subsequent
research has suggested the net undercount may have been
substantially less than first thought.
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On the Net:
Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/
(Copyright 2002 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)