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Census tries bilingual surveys to lure Hispanic respondents

ATLANTA — Bilingual census questionnaires in English and Spanish have arrived at some households throughout the country this month as the U.S. Census Bureau experiments with how to encourage more responses from the growing number of Spanish-speaking households.

The census also wants to experiment with Internet questionnaires, as 55 percent of families now have access to the Internet.

Hispanics tend to be undercounted in the census, demographers say. There are a variety of reasons: Some may be illegal immigrants; others simply don't trust the government; others can't speak the language and don't understand the forms.

Census data is important because the government uses the numbers to allocate grant money for housing, education and other programs and to determine the number of representatives in Congress and in state legislatures.

Many don't want to talk to census takers despite its importance.

"Fear is the biggest thing," census spokesman Dave McMahon said. "There is fear that we're going to share the information with other government agencies," he said. "We can't do that by law," he added.

Census data is held confidential for 72 years before it can be made public.

It's not just Hispanics who are reluctant to be counted. "Some people from Eastern Bloc [former Communist] countries who have lived under repressive regimes are also wary," McMahon said.

There's also privacy concerns from people who have lived in the United States all their lives. It's hard, for example, to conduct a survey in a gated community. "People live in them because they want to be left alone," McMahon said.

The Census Bureau mailed 420,000 questionnaires in late August to a random sampling of homes nationwide.

The mailing included 10,000 bilingual forms in English and in Spanish. Census-takers also want to allow people to fill out the forms over the Internet during this test run.

The Census Bureau is testing the new Spanish language and Internet forms. They won't necessarily use them in the 2010 census.

For the 2000 census, forms went out in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog (the main Philippine language) and Korean to households that specifically requested the forms in their own language.

The forms were not bilingual.

Households participating in this fall's test run were asked to mail back their completed questionnaires or respond via the Internet by Nov. 9.

Mary Lou Pickel writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. E-mail: mpickel@ajc.com