Immigration Law Complicates Census Planning

The new immigration law has injected urgency into the issue of how newly legal residents will be questioned during the next census and has intensified the battle over whether illegal immigrants should be counted at all.

Officials at the Census Bureau are in the final stage of developing questionnaires for the 1990 count and are negotiating with representatives of various ethnic groups to decide which questions should be asked about the groups and how they should be worded. Congress will thrash out these issues in hearings this week and next.

Required by law to provide the legislators with the questions’ exact wording by next April, the bureau already has outlined the 1990 forms for lawmakers and currently is evaluating results from a new series of “content test forms” from around the nation.

Latino Preferred in L.A.

Even how to identify ethnic groups on the forms is being debated. “People in Los Angeles prefer Latino,” said Emma Moreno, congressional affairs officer at the Census Bureau, “because they consider Hispanic an East Coast word. But in New York, Puerto Ricans won’t identify themselves as Latinos.”

Noting this, Arthur R. Cresce, a census statistician, said: “Sometimes a suggestion for a term may be great regionally, but we have to cover the whole nation. You balance these things, and you do the best you can.”

The impact of the count is broad and profound, influencing everything from the pattern of congressional districts to marketing techniques that companies use to reach target populations. Thus, negotiations over tone and content of the questionnaires are crucial because they will help determine whether many immigrants will participate in the count.

Millions of illegal immigrants last week began seeking legal residency, or amnesty, under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Those who qualify become eligible for citizenship beginning Nov. 1, 1993. The new law also calls for fines and jail terms for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

Aggressive Negotiators

The biggest share of the expected 4 million amnesty applicants will come from the Latino population, the nation’s largest foreign-language minority. For that reason, Latino interest groups are the most aggressive in the negotiations with the Census Bureau.

Those who qualify for legal status probably will be counted willingly, experts said. However, those who fail to qualify and those who do not even apply likely will dig themselves further underground, these experts said.

Grace Davis, deputy mayor of Los Angeles, calling the program extremely important to the city, said: “If it results in a lot of deportations, that will have a negative effect on the census” because other illegal immigrants will refuse to come forward for counting.

“Legalization cuts both ways,” said Mario Moreno, associate counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “If you don’t qualify for amnesty, then the name of the game is secrecy again.”

Undercounts Cited

He said there should be a “moratorium on any enforcement” of deportation laws by the Immigration and Naturalization Service during the census. Citing undercounts of minorities during the 1980 census, he said that the government should advertise the moratorium and encourage illegal immigrants to participate in the count.

However, Roger L. Conner, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said that, while he has conceded that newly legal residents will be counted, enumerating the illegal immigrants would be comparable with tallying a hostile invasion, like counting “an army of Russian troops invading Oregon.”

INS spokesman Verne Jervis said that during the last census the agency “reduced our enforcement tremendously,” noting that apprehensions dropped to 910,000 in 1980 from more than a million in each of the previous three years.

Jervis added, however, that “no policy decisions have been addressed on the next census. We’ve got our plate very, very full with legalization and employer sanctions.”

Illegal Immigrants Too

For its part, the Census Bureau is busily gearing up for the count. It will include illegal immigrants as usual--unless Conner and other critics can persuade Congress or the courts to outlaw the practice.

The bureau’s preparations are being monitored closely.

Joseph M. Trevino, executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, citing the new immigration law’s potential for increasing the nation’s official Latino population, urged the bureau to start identifying census counters now and to ensure that it will “hire people who know the community.”

Rep. Mervyn M. Dymally (D-Compton), chairman of the Post Office and Civil Service subcommittee on census and population, who has scheduled oversight hearings on Thursday and next Tuesday, urged that the bureau “live up to its history” of confidentiality. “The amnesty program makes an assumption that everybody is going to sign up or leave the country,” he said. “That is not the case.”

Daunting Task

The Census Bureau has declared that one of its major objectives is the improvement of its race and ethnic questions, but it faces a daunting task. It is trying to learn from its past.

The 1980 forms used the term “Spanish/Hispanic origin or descent,” with several sub-categories, including “Mexican-American.” But because a number of non-Latinos mistakenly identified themselves as Mexican-Americans--apparently because they lived in states bordering Mexico--the bureau in 1990 likely will remind people that the term “refers only to persons of Mexican origin or ancestry.”

In its tests, the bureau has found substantial confusion about the term “Central American,” with some people thinking it means a region of the United States.

Competing interests, often strain the diplomatic talents of census officials. For example, it must decide whether to call people from Taiwan “Taiwanese” or “Chinese” or let them decide.

And some Hawaiians have requested that they be called “native Americans,” raising objections among American Indians. Also, in its tests, the bureau found that the word “race” is repugnant to many people and may cause them to leave the category blank.