For many recent immigrants, the arrival of an official government questionnaire in their mailbox can be a scary thing.
Does it mean they or one of their relatives will be deported? Does it mean the government is tracking their whereabouts? Or is it simply too hard to read, in a language and format that's foreign to them?
These are the questions Spencer Buchholz, a community organizer for Lawrence CommunityWorks, hopes to answer as he goes door to door in the coming weeks, talking to people about why they should answer the 2010 U.S. Census.
"There is a lot of fear of immigration issues," said Buchholz, who hosted a meeting of local activists and government officials in Lawrence on Thursday. "There are so many people in the city who know someone who doesn't have all of their papers. Even if they are a legal resident, they know somebody else who might not be. And the national culture of fear around immigration is not going to help this."
Buchholz is part of the push being undertaken in cities and towns across the country to dispel the myths about the U.S. Census, conducted once every 10 years as mandated by the Constitution. The results are used to set Congressional seats as well as guide funding for federal social programs.
Lawrence, Buchholz explained, is one of those communities that is traditionally undercounted. He noted that during the 2000 census, some parts of the city had a return rate of around 50 percent.
Starting next month, census forms will go out to millions of homeowners across the country. If they aren't mailed back by May or June, census takers will be sent out to neighborhoods to knock on doors of homes that haven't responded.
In the past, Buchholz said, there has been deep mistrust from some groups, like the Cambodian community in Lowell, who were concerned that the government was using the information on the forms to find out where they lived.
"These are people who had gone through the Khmer Rouge," he said, referring to the despotic regime in Cambodia that killed millions of people believed to be sympathetic to the West.
In fact, U.S. Census forms are highly classified documents, and anyone releasing information contained on them is subject to heavy fines and jail sentences.
In an effort to ease residents' fears, Buchholz and others in the area will be conducting their own door-to-door campaign in the coming weeks to inform local residents that the census is not something to be feared, but something to be embraced.
He said ads will air on Spanish radio, and census workers will be stationed at public facilities all over the region, from libraries and senior centers to churches and schools, answering questions from skeptics about the census.
Losing a seat?
Though its population has risen slightly over the past decade, Massachusetts hasn't kept pace with the population growth in other states. So depending on this year's count, it's possible that the state could lose a Congressional seat.
Seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are apportioned based on population, meaning states with high growth rates could pick up seats, while states with low growth rates could lose them.
That's why Bay State officials have been pushing since last year to publicize the importance of this year's census.
The population of Massachusetts in 2000, when the last federal census was conducted, was 6,349,113, according to the U.S. Census Bureau Web site. The state has grown 2.3 percent in the eight years since, based on 2008 population estimates.
While that shows some growth, the problem is that more people have moved into other states.
The average growth per state for that time is 8 percent, according to the Census Bureau. Virginia grew 9.7 percent during that period, and Arizona grew at a 26.7 percent rate.
New Hampshire, with just two seats in Congress, is unlikely to lose a seat, in part because its population has maintained a steady growth rate over the last decade. The number of residents there grew about 6.5 percent from 2000 to 2008, from about 1.2 million to 1.3 million.
With such high stakes, city and town clerks and members of the congressional delegation have been planning ahead to help maximize census participation in their communities.
Congresswoman Niki Tsongas, D-Lowell, is part of that effort, because she recognizes that a Massachusetts seat could be on the chopping block.
"I'm doing everything I can to make sure that doesn't happen," she said. "Our goal is to maintain a Merrimack Valley-centric district, rather than getting it carved up into pieces."
Tsongas has committed a staff member to work on getting the word out in Lowell and Lawrence, communities that make up a large portion of the area's population and have seen significant undercounting in the past.
She said the final decision about reassigning Congressional seats won't be made until after the final numbers are submitted to President Barack Obama on Dec. 31 of this year.
If Massachusetts' population has indeed dropped, then the Legislature would redraw the district lines and someone could be forced out of office.
"But that's another fight for another day," Tsongas said. "Right now, we want to make sure everybody gets counted."
Getting the local count
Local census offices have already opened in Tewksbury, Mass., and Portsmouth, N.H., and will be the staging areas for census efforts. The Tewksbury office will serve all of the Merrimack Valley communities, and the Portsmouth office will serve Southern New Hampshire.
Bruce Kaminski, the Census Bureau's Deputy Regional Director in Boston, said 1,000 to 1,500 people will be hired in each of the local branches to conduct the follow-up response visits to homes that failed to mail in their census forms.
Beginning in March, residents will be getting census forms in the mail. By law, residents are required to fill out the forms, detailing the name, age, ethnic origin and other personal information of every individual living in that household as of April 1, 2010. Under the law, people can be fined for not filling out the form, although that rarely happens.
People who don't fill out the forms and continue to ignore mailed requests for census forms will be visited by a census worker. Those so-called "non-response follow-ups" will be conducted from May 1 to July 10.
The census takers will be identified by badges and carrying notebooks with the questionnaires inside. They will be asking only those questions that appear on the census forms.
The Census Bureau has spent a massive amount of money this year publicizing the nationwide count. It has used everything from blogs to roving census vans to a massive television ad campaign.
A $350 million advertising campaign kicked off during the Golden Globe Awards last month. Ads will continue running on TV and other media through the summer.
Another avenue for getting the word out is the Census in Schools program, in which the government provides teaching materials for schools on an assortment of census-related material, such as economic and ethnic data about Americans.
"Educators are trusted voices in the community," Kaminski said. "We deliver the message to students, and when they come home from school, the message will help bring that awareness that census is happening out there."
