Mike Schneider
Associated Press
U.S. Census Bureau officials said May 6 that they are ready to begin reviewing changes that combine race and ethnicity and adding a Middle East and North Africa category to the 2030 census questionnaire, but they must wait for another federal office Start a conversation.
That office is the White House Office of Management and Budget, which develops definitions of racial and ethnic background for all federal agencies. The Census Bureau has been using the Office of Management and Budget standards established in 1997.
If the recommendations are adopted by the 2030 Census, they would mark one of the biggest changes to the census questionnaire in recent years.
In the years leading up to the last census in 2020, there was growing support for combining race and ethnicity into one question and adding the Middle East and North Africa category, also known as MENA. Doing so will improve the accuracy of the decennial U.S. demographics, especially among Hispanics and people of Middle Eastern or North African descent who are unsure how to answer the question of race, Census Bureau research suggests.
But those efforts were abandoned after President Donald Trump became president. As a result, there are no MENA categories, and race and ethnicity questions are separated on the 2020 census form, leading to the overwhelming majority of Hispanic respondents answering “other races” in the racial category, Census Bureau officials said.
“We were not surprised by the results. Our study predicted them,” Meriris Rios-Vargas, chief of the Census Bureau’s Division of Race and Ancestry, told members of the Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Friday.
One of the committee members, Helen Hatab Samhan, a retired executive at the Arab American Institute, said it would be better to add MENA as a racial category, such as Hispanic, rather than a racial category, such as white , Black, Asian, American Indian or Native Hawaiian.
One of the items the Census Bureau wants to study is the lack of responses by Hispanics to questions about race, how Hispanics identify their race when answering questions, and whether the location of respondents has any bearing on whether they answer those questions. impact, officials said.
Census Bureau Director Robert Santos told committee members that once the conversation with the Office of Management and Budget begins, it will be “quick-started” because the Census Bureau already has a ton of research.
Census data is used to allocate congressional seats among states, redistrict political districts and allocate federal funds.
In a May 6 statement, the Office of Management and Budget did not provide a timetable for when it would review the questions posed by the Census Bureau.
“We are actively working to help ensure that the federal statistical system effectively, effectively and accurately captures the diversity of the American people,” the statement said.
