US Census undercounts of Valley residents must end so region can get its fair share | Opinion
With the newly-elected speaker of the House of Representatives, Congress is able to address pressing problems once again. But massive battles over budget-cutting will persist and possibly even intensify. San Joaquin Valley communities are likely to be particularly hard hit.
The region has been fiscally shortchanged due to census undercounting for many years, and fiscal year 2024 budget shortfalls and in future years threaten to make their situation still worse.
California currently receives more than $240 billion per year in federal funding that’s distributed using data derived from the 2020 Census and the yearly American Community Survey. The accuracy of these data are crucial for assuring that California and each community in the state receives its fair share of federal funding.
What is the immediate problem? The House Appropriations Committee proposed funding for the Census Bureau in the coming year that represents a 20% cut to the Biden administration’s request and is more than 30% below experts’ recommendations for the support needed to successfully improve census data quality.
Now, even more than in the past, the Census Bureau deserves the funding it needs to improve the quality of data it generates that is so widely used by government agencies, businesses, and local community organizations and planners.
In an era when public willingness to respond to surveys is decreasing, when the U.S. is increasingly diverse, and the gap between rich and poor is widening, the challenge of assuring reliable census data to equitably allocate scarce funding will be more difficult and require more effort than in the past.
Opinion
Future trends in the San Joaquin Valley will make data collection increasingly challenging. Increasing housing costs will push more and more low-income San Joaquin Valley families into crowded households that are difficult to count. Distrust of government, will continue to grow. Efforts to improve broadband access in rural areas will move forward slowly. The Census Bureau needs a budget increase to support solid improvement and enhanced partnerships with local community stakeholders that are needed to overcome historical undercounting.
Why is accurate census data so hard to get for the San Joaquin Valley? There are many deep pockets of low census response throughout the region, both in small, rural communities such as Huron, San Joaquin and Mendota and in low-income neighborhoods of urban Fresno, Bakersfield and Stockton.
Inevitably, the Census 2030 undercount in low-income agricultural communities with uneven broadband-access and concentrations of immigrants may be still higher than the Census 2020 undercount of Latinos at the national level. It was officially 5% in 2020 — the worst census in decades and recent Census Bureau research suggests the undercount may actually have been even higher.
How does undercounting affect local communities? More than 340 federal funding streams distribute dollars using census-derived data. Many of these are programs crucial to economically struggling families’ survival, ability to get ahead, and community well-being.
Key ones for San Joaquin Valley communities that may be shortchanged without reliable census and ACSA data include: programs to combat hunger such as SNAP; school lunch and breakfast programs; support for enhanced instruction in schools where many students live in poverty poverty; housing assistance for retirees and others with low incomes; community health centers; workforce skills development; and small business loans.
The Census Bureau has acknowledged serious shortcomings in the Census 2020 and ACS data and committed itself to a decade-long effort to fix it. Responding to the growing evidence of massive undercounts of non-citizens, most of them Latinos, the Census Bureau has made it a priority to overcome the problem of undercounting. Under the leadership of Dr. Robert Santos, its’ first Mexican-American Director, the Census Bureau is already engaged in proactive planning and innovation to improve census enumeration of historically undercounted populations—in part by strengthening collaboration with local community organizations.
Congressional decisions on appropriations should be made based on careful consideration of the costs and benefits of federal program spending and the benefits they deliver to the families and communities that need help in surviving and thriving, not political rhetoric.
San Joaquin Valley residents should call on their Republican congressional representatives — Congressman David Valadao of Hanford (who is a member of the House Appropriations Committee), and Reps. Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield and John Duarte of Turlock — to persuade their budget-cutting colleagues in the House of Representatives to provide the financial support necessary to assure accurate census and ACS data in 2024 and in the years to come.
Tania Pacheco-Werner is executive director of the Central Valley Health Policy Institute at Fresno State. Ed Kissam has studied the undercount of farmworkers and other Latino immigrants for three decades. He is a member of The Census Quality Reinforcement Task Force, a national network of census experts and stakeholders.
