Drive to have Arabs in US fill out census forms

Sharmila Devi, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: May 12. 2009 11:32PM UAE / May 12. 2009 7:32PM GMT

NEW YORK // Arabic speakers are not often in high demand in the United States, but Linda Sarsour, the director of the Arab American Association of New York, a welfare services group, is busy trying to find such people to work on next year’s US census.

Around 50 Arabic speakers will be hired in total and most of them will work to help persuade Arab households to fill in their census forms. Arab immigrants have been under-represented in previous censuses, partly because they feared the information could be used against them, as might have been the case in their country of origin.

The head count, which starts next April, is expected to be the largest peacetime operation in US history. More than one million people will go door-to-door collecting information from households that do not respond to questionnaires that will be mailed to every known US address.

More than 300 million people live in the US and the population of major cities such as New York has shifted considerably since the last census in 2000, given the rapidly altering pattern of immigration as global economic fortunes change.

Ms Sarsour has already helped recruit about 20 Arabic speakers to work for the US Census Bureau, a federal agency, in Bay Ridge, an Arab-American neighbourhood in Brooklyn, where they are currently checking addresses with buildings to ensure that the census questionnaire is mailed to the right people.

Immigrants who are undocumented and in the United States illegally need particular reassurance so they know that participation will not lead to a knock on the door from immigration officials.

“We’re getting the word in our community with the help of religious leaders about how important it is to take part in the census,” said Ms Sarsour, a Palestinian-American whose family is originally from El Bireh, near Ramallah.

Up to 450,000 Arab-Americans, including citizens and non-citizens, live in New York City, which would make them the second-largest concentration of the community after the state of Michigan. Various groups estimate there are at least 3.5 million Arab-Americans nationwide, but fewer than 1.5 million people of Arab descent were identified in the 2000 census.

Census data are used to allocate local, state and federal funding for education, health and other welfare services and also to redraw congressional districts for federal representation.

But advocacy groups are disappointed that the 2010 census will be shorter than the last, partly because of expense, and will not collect data on people’s ancestry, which is left to the annual American Community Survey, which uses a much smaller sample of only three million people.

Next year’s census will have a question on race, but Arabs will be counted as white after Arab-American groups failed to persuade the authorities to include a separate category.

“We tried to convince them to add the ancestry question but it’s not going to happen,” said Helen Samhan, the executive director of the Arab American Institute Foundation, which partners with the Census Bureau. “Race is an American construct whereas many Arab immigrants relate more to country, language or religion. For every Arab-American who filled in the form last time, two did not, so there was considerable underreporting.”

The US constitution bars mandatory questions about religious affiliation, but the census used to include data from religious organisations up to the 1930s. This was stopped after the Jewish community feared the data could be used to justify the high levels of anti-Semitism at the time.

Some Muslim leaders today similarly believe it would be counterproductive to collect government data on religion, which is collated by private organisations such as Gallup and Pew, Ms Samhan said.

But Wael Mousfar, the president of the Arab Muslim American Federation, an umbrella group for 16 religious, social, educational and political organisations in New York, said he would like to see a more accurate count of Muslims in the United States.

“I would support a question on religion, not for us to be treated differently but for the sake of knowing,” he said. “Muslims are growing in big numbers, there might be up to eight million in the US and we have to exercise whatever rights we have to work to our advantage.”

Mehdi Bozorgmehr, a professor at the City University of New York’s graduate Middle East centre, said the race categories in the census were influenced by the 1960s civil rights movement, when African-American and American-Indian groups successfully pushed for their inclusion. He would also welcome data on religion.

“It would be fantastic to have more data because religion is so salient,” he said. “We used to talk about America being a Judeo-Christian country but this is changing. Groups such as Pew do work on this but it’s not the same as official data. But it’s unconstitutional for the government to ask.”

Ms Sarsour, meanwhile, said she was getting plenty of applicants for census jobs, which pay between $14 and $25 per hour. The US minimum wage is $7.15 per hour.

“But not everybody passes the critical and psychological tests which have to be taken for any government job,” she said. “Even if a person is well-educated in their own language, they might not necessarily pass if their English isn’t good enough. US citizens are prioritised for these jobs but they might consider permanent residents for their language skills.”

She still believed Arab-Americans should take part in the census even if it will not give an accurate count of the community.

“People ask me, ‘What am I getting out of it?’ I say listen, the more people who are counted, the more funding we can get for our schools, hospitals, transport, even fixing the streets,” she said. “Another part of me does think a question on religion might have been helpful. But Arabs tend to see their identity by nationality, Syrian, Yemeni or whatever, and that is a definite trend in our community.”



sdevi@thenational.ae