Do immigrants in KC feel safe enough to stand up and be counted in the 2020 census?

With concerns about the global coronavirus pandemic rightly front and center, for now and for the foreseeable future, that invitation to complete the 2020 census that you’ve either just received or soon will might not have your full attention.

But both how $265 billion a year in federal dollars are divided up and how many congressional seats each state gets are based on the population totals from this once-a-decade exercise.

So if anything, the health services and financial challenges related to the contagion make participation in this year’s census even more important.

That’s especially true among the most vulnerable Kansas Citians. Which makes it particularly unfortunate that some immigrants don’t feel safe enough to stand up and be counted.

That means fewer federal dollars for Kansas City public schools, food programs, low-income housing and federally-supported services of all kinds.

The fear is understandable. One American-born Kansas Citian who is waiting on her husband’s citizenship papers to come through described the day-to-day insecurity of their situation. Because he is undocumented, she said, he’s too afraid to be included and she feels forced to tell a lie of omission on the form she plans to fill out.

Her husband, who was born in El Salvador, “pays his taxes, contributes to the community and is a good person who has to hide,” she said. “Would he love to be able to contribute his information and be counted? He would love to, but he says I don’t want to one day find out someone’s knocking at the door” to deport him as a result of his cooperation. “He doesn’t trust all the information they’re gathering would not be used against him.”

The Trump administration tried and failed to get a citizenship question put on this year’s census. The administration argued that it wanted to use the information to help them safeguard protections for minorities under the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court said no and found that this whole line of reasoning “seems to have been contrived.”

The information gathered through the census is absolutely not supposed to be used by immigration officials. The form itself offers this assurance to noncitizens: “The law prevents the Census Bureau from sharing your information with law enforcement. Your answers cannot be used to impact your eligibility for government benefits. Your answers are only used to create statistics about our country. The Census Bureau is bound by Title 13 of the U.S. Code to protect your personal information and keep it strictly confidential. That’s every answer, to every question.”

Local immigration attorney Roger McCrummen said that after being lied to about the reason the citizenship question was ever proposed, “there’s a real lack of trust they’ll use the information in the proper way,” and a lot of fear that “they’d collect information on family members and then go arrest them. I want people to register, but you can understand there’s no trust with this administration.”

An undocumented woman whose parents brought her here from Mexico when she was only 2 years old said her American-born younger sister has been trying to talk her into participating in the census, but “I’ll just ignore it. Everybody says ICE,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “comes to your house if they know where you’re at.”

Unsurprising as that view is, the government does need this information for so many valid reasons that everyone who can be counted really should be.

Our public schools, along with federal contributions to housing, transportation and health care — in other words, all of us — are counting on it. Which is yet another reason that it’s so short-sighted of us as a country to be content to keep the immigrants who contribute so much in the shadows.

“We encourage all people — including undocumented — to complete the census,” said Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center. Despite the complications, she said, “it is so important that every voice be heard.”

This story was originally published March 16, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Do immigrants in KC feel safe enough to stand up and be counted in the 2020 census?."