The census may be more than a year away, but the undercount issue looms larger than ever and cannot be addressed soon enough. California officials recognize that and are convening such meetings across the state, including the one in Camarillo.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The Constitution offers a simple\u00a0directive for the census\u00a0\u2014 \u201ccounting the whole number of persons in each State.\u201d Over the decades, that has included slaves, children too young to vote and, yes, undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n
The government uses\u00a0the census\u00a0data to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars annually for health care, education and other community services. In 2010, it amounted to more than $1,200 per person, so for every 100 people the census does not count, a city could be shorted $120,000 a year.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0number of U.S. House seats each state gets also is based on the census. If immigrants and others are greatly undercounted, some states may lose seats, including at least one in California, some advocates say.<\/p>\n
In the 2010\u00a0census, California represented 12 percent of the U.S. population but nearly 22 percent of those living in hard-to-count tracts. Areas of Ventura County most likely to be undercounted include parts of south and central Oxnard, downtown and east Santa Paula, Fillmore and tracts northeast of Ventura along Highway 33, The Star reported last week. They are areas with high proportions of foreign-born residents, poverty, limited English proficiency, renters and children under age 5.<\/p>\n
Census form answers are confidential by law, but it\u2019s reasonable to assume \u2014 especially in the current environment \u2014 that many of the undocumented will fear their information will be shared with immigration agents.<\/p>\n
Making matters worse are plans by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who decides what the\u00a0census\u00a0will ask, to add a question about citizenship status for the first time since 1950. Ross says it will help identify voting-rights violations and racial discrimination, but six former\u00a0Census\u00a0Bureau directors \u2014 Republicans and Democrats alike \u2014 sent a letter to Ross saying it \u201cwould put the accuracy of the enumeration and success of the\u00a0census\u00a0in all communities at grave risk.\u201d<\/p>\n
We agree and hope legal challenges against the question are successful. States, cities and other groups have filed a total of six lawsuits against the Census Bureau to remove the question.<\/p>\n
In fact, Census Bureau Director Ron Jarmin told npr.org last week that the controversy over the question is complicating census preparations. \u201cWe need to get a complete and accurate census,\u201d he said, \u201cand we will do everything we can to ensure that.\u201d<\/p>\n
We hope he is true to his word, but we\u2019re glad that our state and local officials already are working on Plan B.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1449,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"give_campaign_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-coverage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/da\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/da\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/da\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/da\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/da\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/da\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/da\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/da\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/da\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/da\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}