Americans Abroad Want to Be Counted

Joseph Smallhoover says the fact that he has lived abroad for more than a dozen years doesn’t mean he’s given up on America.

But he feels as though the government has abandoned him and countless other overseas Americans by not including them in the population counts done once every 10 years.

A lawyer practicing in France, Smallhoover is part of an effort by millions of private Americans living outside the country to be included in the 2000 census.

Federal employees and their dependents abroad who live either on embassy grounds or military installations were counted in 1990 and will be next year. But other Americans overseas were ignored.

“It is as if we are being treated as the black sheep of the family,” Smallhoover, chairman of the group Democrats Abroad, said.

“We may be outside of the country, but we have not given up our ties to America,” added Smallhoover, who is from Pittsburgh.

His group is part of the Census 2000 Coalition, which has drafted a plan that it says will allow them to be included in the population count that begins next April.

But Kenneth Prewitt, the Census Bureau director, said it was too late in the process to change plans for the 2000 census without jeopardizing its accuracy.

Bureau staff recently discussed the plan with representatives from the coalition but concluded that the agency “cannot credibly enumerate the population of American citizens living abroad,” he said.

There also are concerns about the bureau’s ability to correct invalid responses and how to conduct what essentially would be a worldwide count, Prewitt said.

Estimates of the number of private American citizens living in other countries range anywhere from 3 million to 10 million, various witnesses testified.

Prewitt said the bureau tried to count them in 1960 and 1970 but was disappointed with the results. He did not rule out future counts, however, and told Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) that he would support legislation she is drafting for a census in 2003 of private Americans overseas.

Meanwhile, Rep. Benjamin Gilman (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House International Committee, introduced a nonbinding “sense of the Congress” resolution urging the Census Bureau to include all Americans living abroad in its population counts.

He said existing policy was “inconsistent” and “incoherent.”

Rep. Dan Miller (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Government Reform subcommittee on the census, said Maloney’s effort, if enacted, could lay the groundwork for counting these Americans in 2010.

“We have to come up with a way to count overseas citizens,” he said. “They vote and they pay taxes, a lot of them, and they have every right to be counted. We need to find a way to do it, certainly, for 2010.”