Hawaii’s ethnic
By Susan Kreifels
minorities count,
census officials told
Star-BulletinNo head count, no money, and less political clout.
And that's important to ethnic communities, which want a louder voice in the United States.
Next year, the country will conduct a national census, taken every decade, and census officials say ethnic minorities are always undercounted.
That means less federal money available for programs targeting those groups and less political representation.
Census officials met with leaders of ethnic groups here yesterday to try and change that. The meeting was sponsored by the Korean American Coalition, Hawaii Chapter, the first ethnic organization to work with census officials in the state. The coalition hopes to get more ethnic groups involved.
"We need this kind of activism in the community," said Gregory Pai, a coalition board member and commissioner on the Public Utilities Commission. "It means political power ... so voices can be heard."
Pai said a recent initiative in Washington to project population by sampling in the next census was "defeated by people who don't want to count Asian Americans."
Kem Worley of the Los Angeles Regional Census Center under the U.S. Bureau of the Census said an estimated 2.7 percent of the 249 million Americans counted in the 1990 census were missed, most of them new immigrants. That's 6.7 million people.
A documented 21,000 were not counted in Hawaii, said Rhoda A.L. Kaluai, community partnership specialist for the Bureau of the Census in Hawaii. But she believes there were many more.
For example, the 1990 census counted about 24,000 Koreans, but the Korean American Coalition estimates a number closer to 40,000, she said.
That adds up to a lot of federal dollars that Hawaii loses. Robert Asato, office manager for the Honolulu Early Local Census Office, said each person in the state receives an average $150 of federal money annually for a decade, or about $185 million a year.
That includes funding for ethnic programs including housing, jobs and help for the elderly.
Kaluai said she believes there's an especially low count of Pacific islanders, like the influx of Micronesians, and Southeast Asians, such as Cambodians and Vietnamese. Some come from countries "where their governments were not too good to them. They're nervous about giving information to the government."
Census officials stress that population statistics are completely confidential and not shared with any other agency. Names are taken off the statistics once gathered.
This year Hawaii is developing a training program for census workers to be more culturally sensitive, said Lisa Naito, a census technician here.
Asato said the estimated population in Hawaii in the next census is slightly higher: 1.2 million compared with 1.1 million in 1990. Another local census office will be opened in Kailua.
