Christopher Coen
Melissa Sogard
nancylee1
Somehow the census count for Lexington, Nebraska – site of a large influx of refugee secondary migrants seeking jobs in the meatpacking plants – has somehow managed to avoid counting many of those refugees. An article in the Lexington Clipper-Herald doesn’t give any probable reasons for this miscount besides noting that many of the census forms at one building ended up in the garbage. …LEXINGTON – City officials aren’t confident that 2010 Census figures reflect the town’s actual population and fear the newest residents, refugees from Africa, may have been undercounted.
According to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau last week, Lexington grew by only 219 people during the past 10 years, a 2.2 percent increase.
“It’s much lower than what I expected,” Assistant City Manager Dennis Burnside said of the official 2010 Census population count of 10,230.…Mayor John Fagot agreed that something appears amiss in the count. “I question the number,” he said. “They say the return rate (by mail) was 72 percent, and that reflects it. I think we have a number of people who weren’t able to be reached, for one reason or another, and weren’t counted.”
Lexington landlord Deanna White remembered census difficulties last spring. “A lot of people didn’t fill out their forms. We know that for sure. We found forms all over, on the ground, in hallways, Dumpsters – they were everywhere,” she said.This was despite efforts to educate residents on the census and offers to help them fill out their form. A census worker followed up and obtained the information from 81 people residing in the apartments on April 1, White said.Burnside said Somali leaders in Lexington report their
group’s population at 2,000, but the census figures don’t support that. Fagot said as the African refugee population increased he didn’t notice a corresponding exodus of others from Lexington……While 3,039 people in Lexington, or 30 percent, were considered some other race, that figure is 42 people less than the 3,081 in 2000 and doesn’t satisfactorily guarantee that all the African refugees were counted.J.J. White, the newly selected chairman of the Somali Community Center and a landlord in Lexington, said based on the people he sees in town and the traffic
coming through the Somali Community Center, he thinks there are more people than the census captured.“They tell me there’s close to 2,000 in town,” he said referring specifically to Somalians while noting there are additional people from Sudan, Liberia and other African countries. “I’m going on what I get fed by other people. I definitely think it’s low.”… Read more here
I thought that census workers automatically went to apartment buildings that seem to have an under-count and knocked on doors. Isn’t it just assumed that people with English-as-a-second language might not fill out the forms? Why did the census workers only go back to one apartment building?
Plus, wouldn’t you think that the ORR would have given the U.S. Census Bureau a heads-up on the need to count this population of refugees in Lexington since this is a site of one of their secondary-migration impact studies?
