Census estimates show 2000 count missed 509,000 Californians
Saturday December 07, 2002By JUSTIN PRITCHARD
Associated Press Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) More than half a million Californians the majority of them Hispanics were left out of the 2000 U.S. Census, according to new estimates released under a court order.
That undercount could have cost California billions in federal funding.
The new estimate of California's population, 34,380,660 residents, is 509,000 people more than the official count released last year.
The official count reflected the number of people census workers located when they fanned out in the spring of 2000 by the bureau's own admission, not every Californian. Friday's data represented an estimate of the total number they would have tallied if they actually talked to everyone.
Of the 509,000 missed people, about 298,000 were Hispanic.
In Los Angeles County alone, Hispanics accounted for two-thirds of the 171,000 people who weren't counted. In Fresno County, three-quarters of the 13,300 people who weren't counted were Hispanic.
``Despite the strong push for Hispanic census participation, undercount has lead to their under-representation in most of California,'' said Bill Frey, a demographer at the Milken Institute of Santa Monica.
There are street-level reasons for this. Minorities tend to be poorer and thus live more transient lives in apartments making them harder to track down. Also, some undocumented immigrants may shy away from filling out their forms, though it did not ask about legal status.
``We know the census undercounts Hispanics, we know it undercounts blacks. It undercounts whites less, probably overcounts them in some cases,'' Frey said. ``To the extent federal programs are directed to minorities, this is a real concern.''
Last year, the federal government decided to use the unadjusted count in funding formulas for about $185 billion worth of programs running from housing block grants to Medicaid to public school funding.
Census officials have called the 2000 count among the most accurate ever and cautioned that the statistically adjusted numbers are flawed and are of little value.
During the 1990s, California lost out on $2.2 billion in federal funding based on the undercount from the 1990 census, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office. It appears that this time again, California would have been better off under the adjusted count.
The new data broke down the 509,000-person undercount along all racial lines.
Among the 211,000 undercounted non-Hispanics, 91,000 were white; 61,000 were black; 34,000 were Asian; 6,000 were American Indian; and 5,100 were Pacific Islander. The other 13,000 were multiracial.
Overall, census counters catalogued about 1.5 percent fewer people than California's actual population. That exceeded the 1.2 percent estimated undercount nationally.
In general, states that are either rural or have large minority populations registered the largest undercounts California has both characteristics. Counters may have missed thousands of people in Los Angeles' inner city but they also failed to find 5,300 blacks in Alameda County and 2,500 whites in sparsely populated Butte County.
The bureau reluctantly released the data based on a San Francisco federal court's order. Opponents of releasing the adjusted numbers, mainly Republicans, have said the complicated statistical methods used to determine the undercount would simply add more error into the results.
The new data provided from the Census Bureau was based on research done in March 2001. Bureau officials said subsequent research has suggested the net undercount may have been substantially less than first thought.
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