Why This Census is Different: Stories From Immigrant Community Leaders and the Work Ahead for the 2030 Census

Today's episode focuses on the upcoming 2030 census and the factors playing into how this cycle could look different from previous ones while still facing the usual challenges.

Listen to hear:

-Stories from immigrant community leaders of undercounts, impacts of federal policy changes, and declining trust with government

-Why the census matters, from money to representation

-The practical challenges of building address lists, a well planned and staffed outreach strategy, and other considerations

-Why the efforts for the 2030 census are starting now and the next steps

For more information and to share your thoughts, please head over to willbrownsberger.com. 

Transcript

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Matt: 0:00

Welcome to the Will Brownsberger Podcast. Hi, I'm producer Matt Hanna. In every episode, I sit down for a conversation with Massachusetts State Senator Will Brownsberger to explore some of the biggest issues facing the Commonwealth and its people. In this episode, Will shares thoughts and perspectives from his recent work chairing the Senate Commission on the Census. So here's the conversation with Will. So welcome to another episode of the Will Brownsberger Podcast. Here with Will. And today we want to talk a little bit about some work you've been doing recently. You are the chair on the Senate Committee on the Census, and you've been digging back into that work. How's that been going?

Will: 0:37

Yeah, you know, there's the sort of cosmic issues like the environment and climate and housing and these things we're wrestling with, and everybody, you know, and all my constituents are worrying about, and the Trump administration and so forth. But then there are the sort of blocking and tackling issues that are a little bit under the radar, and these are things that we do have to pay attention to. And so the census is one of those things, but really lately, as I've been engaging with it, it's tying right back to the biggest issues that we're all worrying about right now, particularly around immigration. You know, the challenge of getting a complete count of the people in this Commonwealth in 2030 is going to be really difficult. It's always been difficult. And we did a hearing recently where some of that testimony came out. Maybe it's a good time to hear from Gladys Vega from Chelsea just to set the stage about the extent of that undercount that we've had. 

Matt: 1:30

And who is Gladys Vega? 

Will: 1:31

Gladys Vega is one of the most respected people out there, really, because she does an incredible job delivering food and other necessities to people in poverty. Through COVID, she did amazing work. And now with the SNAP shortage, she's been doing amazing work. She's just somebody who really is a very respected leader in Chelsea and really statewide. So when she testifies, people listen.

Gladys Vega: 1:54

And when we did the 2020 count, if I'm not mistaken, it was like 42 or 44,000 people that live in the city of Chelsea. As we write grants in our city for funding, we, the number that we use is pretty much 65,000 to 70,000 people that live in the city of Chelsea. Talk about undercounted. I mean, we had a fire the other day in the summer. Three apartments, 38 people were replaced, and we had to open my office to put air mattress because we could the city of Chelsea couldn't find hotels. And we had them all sleeping with us here with my my president, my me as the president and my vice president sleeping on the floors here with 38 people that were victims of a fire in a triple decker.

Will: 2:41

You heard that, right? 38 people coming out of a triple decker as a result of a fire. By the way, the actual number for Chelsea was actually only 40,787. That's what they had in the 2020 census. But what we're hearing from Gladys is guessing a number 60 to 70,000. And as an example of that, 38 people living in a triple decker. Somebody knocks on the door and says, How many people living here? You know, it's me and my two kids. Yeah, so that was the kind of undercount that you had in 2020 in Chelsea, just a massive undercount and a whole lot of reasons for that. But now, in the current environment, and 2030 is only going to be two years after Donald Trump, no matter who's president in 2030. This is the kind of thing we're hearing from immigrant leaders about the challenges in 2030. This is Heloisa Galvão from the Brazilian Women's Group.

Matt: 3:31

What is Heloisa involved with? What's her role?

Will: 3:34

Yeah, so Heloisa is the leader of the Brazilian Women's Collaborative, which is another organization, one of these other nonprofits that reaches out to members of a particular community. Like Gladys Vega in Chelsea, Heloisa in Brighton is just very, very respected as a leader of that community. And somebody who connects to a whole lot of people in that community, provides a lot of services in that community.

Heloisa Galvão: 4:00

What I want to bring here today is that for all this year, we have we have told the people trust the government. File income tax. Answer the census. This data is going nowhere. It doesn't matter if you don't have a status. It's going nowhere. It is important that you file your taxes. It is important that you respond to the census. That's how we get the programs. That we have funding for so many important programs. Now how do I go back to my community? Tell me how do I go back to my community and tell them, we lied to you. We have been betrayed by the government. You’re going to be hunted down, not only because you don’t have a status, but because you did your civic obligation. You filed your taxes and you answered the census. And now you’re in trouble, deep trouble. So that’s what I wanted to reflect with you, you want to tell me how I go on. How in five years, and you may tell, oh yeah, you know, we’re going to vote him out. He can’t be re-elected. It’s going to be different in 2025. No, it’s not. Because it’s very, very easy. It’s easier to destroy than to build. And what is happening, not only here, it’s happening in my homeland in Brazil, is that happening all over. You know, is this narrative from the right wing about the need to destroy, to decimate people that don’t look like the whites or don’t fill their plans of what they consider make America great again.

Will: 6:02

The message that you hear from her when I was listening to the hearing, I found it very moving because on the one hand, clearly you have all kinds of people, you know, in that community who may have documentation issues. They want to be legal. They want to be doing the right thing. And the immigrant leaders want to be supporting them in being legal and counseling them to do as many things right as possible, like fill out their income tax, like participate in the census. But now they feel that maybe I really can't, in good faith, encourage them because that's going to lead to the family separations and so forth, if data can be used to put them on a map in a way that leads to some kind of enforcement. So they're really in a tough double bind. So you heard Heloisa talk about that. Let's go back to Gladys Vega in Chelsea talking about the same thing and that really difficult change that happened when people were told that if they filled out their tax returns, that was confidential information that was not going to be used against them. So immigrant leaders encouraged immigrants to fill out their tax returns and do the right thing. But now there's consequences.

Gladys Vega: 7:46

Why are we gonna give you data? It’s bad enough that I’m constantly feeling guilty at home, at nighttime. Oh my god, we processed in my past five years over 1000 ITIN numbers for people to get those ITIN numbers and they can pay Uncle Sam tax money so they can show good character in case we get legalization. And now with the Trump administration, I’m like, why the hell did I do that? What about if that information is shared? You cannot imagine all the guilt trips that I go through at nighttime seeing how families are being separated. 

Matt: 7:49

So, maybe this a good time to talk about like why is the census important? What are the impacts of being undercounted and all this type of stuff?

Will: 7:56

Yeah, no, the census is something that people, of course, think about for data, but it has a lot of implications. And maybe to hear on that, let's talk to Susan Strate at the UMass Donahue Institute. She testified a couple months ago before our committee. She's an incredible resource for the Commonwealth because she just addresses a whole lot of facets of getting census data right. Let's hear from Susan herself.

Susan Strate: 8:18

So let's shift gears and talk about census 2030. I think you all know why the count is important. One thing I like to always point out is that the census is about data, money, and power. In terms of data, we use census data all the time for public health, for municipal planning, state planning, transportation planning, and all sorts of public concerns. And also the decennial count or the count that we get once every 10 years sets the base for the estimates, the forecasts, and the American Community Survey for the 10 years that follow. You really only get one chance to set the base, it's once every 10 years. And money, of course, the environment is a little bit different right now, but the last report that we have on this from George Washington University indicated that Massachusetts was receiving uh $16 billion in federal funding based on population-based federal funding programs, which equates to over $2,300 per person in the state per year. So you start multiplying that by 10 years and it really starts to add up. And of course, I don't need to tell anyone in this room, but here's the slide. This determines how many seats we get to have in the House of Representatives. We currently have nine congressional seats, that's down from 10 after the 2010 census, when we lost a seat. And just to remind folks how close these margins can be, New York lost a congressional seat after the 2020 count. And they lost it by only 89 people. So when we think about you know outreach to cities and towns and helping them prepare their list, we know that just, you know, a handful of missing addresses has the potential to have a really large impact.

Will: 10:29

So, yeah, I mean, just talking about the importance of the census, you heard Susan Strate talk about that. It's about money, big time, federal money. It's about representation in Congress. More than that, though, it's also about redistricting within the state. So if you think about how the state is divided up, one thing that can happen is that if a neighborhood is substantially undercounted, then that neighborhood's effectively going to have less representation when you draw districts, because the districts are all supposed to be equal size on population. So if you have a district that's counted as 40,000, but there's actually 70,000 people in there, then those people are getting less representation per capita, if you will. And if they're a member of a particular minority group, that can interact with voting rights issues. 

Will: 11:23 

Now, for purposes of districting, we count everybody in the district. So we count people regardless of their age. If a district happens to have a lot of kids in it, you know, it's a lot of young families in this community. Well, they all, every single one of those people count, even though the kids can't vote. In the same way, people that are not citizens, whether documented or not, are also counted for determining the size of the district. When it comes to voting rights issues, only the citizen voting age population counts. But one of the things that Susan Strate was saying in that clip that we heard was that the decennial census is the base for the population estimates in the American Community Survey. So we only have one real count every 10 years. But then the American Community Survey is done every year. It's done on a continuous basis. So you're constantly talking to people and updating estimates based on a sample of the people of how many people are there of voting age, how many of them are citizens? We do ask a citizenship question on the American Community Survey, but the American Community Survey doesn't have an actual count, it's just a sample. And so they have to sort of estimate the growth in population based on various indicators, tax returns, and so forth, but they're always adjusting from that base. So the base, the decennial census, is going to influence your count of the citizen voting age population, even though there's no citizenship question on the census. And that will interact with fair representation issues for minorities, Blacks, Hispanics, make sure that they have districts that, you know, in which they're fairly represented. So that's not only the federal representation, not only the money, not only the data, but also the local redistricting. Those are some of the things that make the census so important.

Matt: 13:18

So we see the importance of this work and what's happening. So now, what's the importance of starting so early? Why are you starting now when this is in 2030?

Will: 13:27

Yeah, so it's a process, and there's a lot of technical stuff to do, and there's a lot of engagement that we need to do through those trusted messengers, like Heloisa, like Gladys. But let's just sort of talk about the process of the census. It's something that's actually going on all decade long in two parts, right. The first part is the addresses. What are all the addresses? What are all the housing units in the country? That is something that's not moving around. We build housing, but it's still constantly changing. People are moving around. So people you count on the certain day and you build up to that count on that certain day, but the housing unit list is something you're building all decade long. And that's complicated. It's challenging. 

Will: 14:11

Where do you even get a list of all the addresses in the country? Well, you have a lot of sources. You have the postal service. You know, that's as up to date as people are actually getting mail at a given address. You have aerial views, flyovers, and you can see what's getting built, but you certainly don't know what's in it. And by the way, is that garage an apartment or is it just a garage? You have taxation, you know, you have local assessors that are keeping track of all the buildings in their municipality so that they can tax them. The assessors are most concerned about value. They're not really concerned about the number of units within the building, except as it bears on value. That's sort of an approximate thing. You have voter lists, but hey, not everybody's registered to vote. And so there's plenty of people living in addresses in any community who are not registered to vote. So those addresses are not on the voter list unless there's somebody living there who's registered. You have utilities. Now that's a pretty powerful source. I mean, everybody's got water, but you know, you might have just one water feed for a building, so you don't know how many units are in it. 

Will: 15:19

So there's no one data source which is complete and perfect that the census can turn to. So they do this annual process of compilation, constantly updating this address list. And in 1990, there was a sense, a perception that the census had not done a very good job of building that address list for the 1990 census, leading to an undercount and so forth. So Congress passed a thing called the Local Update of Census Address Program, which says that every municipality in the country should have the ability to review the list of addresses that's going to be used by the census for counting purposes and give input on it. Of course, the municipality themselves can't give any meaningful input unless they have their own clean address to compare things to. So that process of developing in each municipality a clean address list is a very difficult process. They have to take all those possible sources, the assessors' database, the voter list, the utilities, everything they can get their hands on, merge those together and reconcile all kinds of differences. You know, is it 120 Gilbert Road? Is it 120 Gilbert RD? You know, the spelling differences, and is it 118 and 120 Gilbert Road, or is it 118 Unit 1 and 120 Unit 2? You know, the utilities throw in different unit identifiers. 

Will: 16:50

So there's a lot of challenges in just mechanically identifying all the addresses. And by the way, that gets a little more complicated even when you start trying to say where the addresses are, you know, with a geocode, latitude and longitude. Now, the state has had a huge interest in supporting that, just for 911 purposes. Get a call, where are you? I'm at 120 Gilbert Road. Well, where's 120 Gilbert Road? You going to pull out a map and look for it? No, you better have an accurate place on it. There's a challenge of just actually mapping where units are. It's difficult in every part of the state. It's difficult in urban areas just because all of the different kinds of structures you have. And then in rural areas, road numbering may be confusing, so forth. So there's this huge statewide project of getting that address list in place and getting it accurate. And that's the foundation for the count.

Matt: 17:38

I was just going to go back to the municipal thing. Who in the municipalities is making that list? Is that someone, under someone's role? Is that someone you're tapping to do that? Like how does that happen?

Will: 17:47

Great question. So there's sort of best practices, and then there's sort of medium capacity that's okay, and then there's failing, right. So best practices is the municipality has an understanding of the importance of addresses. And they have somebody who is the address czar, you know, by pursuant to some kind of bylaw that's been enacted. And you can't put a number on your house without that address czar approving it and getting it into the system. So that address czar is going to be aware of every building permit. It's going to go through them. They're going to approve a new address if an address is being added to the system. And they're also responsible for that integration across all those lists. And they've got their one single central database, their perfect geographic information system that they're maintaining, and it has so many benefits for the municipality. So that's the ideal situation is that there is an address czar. That's the best practice. 

Will: 18:43

By the way, I think all the communities that I represent, Belmont, Watertown, Cambridge, Boston, do a very good job with this. Other places, not so much. So there's other places where they don't really have that address czar. But so come in preparation for the 2030 census, what they're going to have to do is do that work of taking those various lists, those various sources, merging them together, trying to make sense out of reconciling difference, which is a very heads-down activity. You know, it's one by one. Is that such and such road north? They mean the north side of the road? Are these the same road or is it a different road? In any municipality, there's going to be hundreds of breaks between these different lists. And so it's just a heads-down activity. That's going to take a few years for people to do that. So that's why we're really eager to have people starting early. And of course, it's going to be the municipalities that have less resources who are not going to have invested in that kind of system or in that kind of staffing. Those are going to be the communities that are hardest to count. You're going to have the highest poverty rate in those communities and the populations that are less likely to participate freely in the census. And the failing level is you don't even have that capacity of someone to integrate that. So we want to avoid that. We want to make sure that every municipality is starting now to build that address database, or that they already have it. But there's plenty of municipalities, and we heard testimony on that in another hearing, that are really not there yet. That's an urgent priority. That's an urgent long-run priority. That's the address side of it. 

Will: 20:11

Then you get to the preparation for the actual count day. You know, how does that work, right. The census does a series of different outreach layers. And by the way, they've gotten further and further away from doing actual people out knocking doors. They still have that, but they're trying to do as much as they possibly can electronically, which is a good thing. I mean, if they can get a good portion of the population electronically, and that's going to vary in different communities. Then they're going to send mail to those people who don't respond electronically, and then they're going to go out and knock doors for the people that they haven't heard from after those efforts. And by the way, then they're going to also try to talk to landlords or somebody else. I mean, the census requires the federal government, the Constitution requires an actual count of the people in the country, but it doesn't say how you have to count them. It doesn't say you must interview them personally. No, email is fine, mail's fine, or even good secondhand information could be valid. Could be a list of students who are living in a given dormitory provided by the university, or it could be an account from a landlord of who's living there. And as long as it's reliable, the census can choose to accept that. 

Will: 21:15

But so let's just think about the challenges that you have, right? I mean, there's various layers in that doing that actual people outreach. First of all, there's people that are just going to be flat out hard to reach. They live in rural areas. They don't have internet access. And by the way, of course, people without internet access could be in urban areas as well. I mean, there's people that are going to be just less connected to the system. They may not have a mailbox on their unit. If you ever have the occasion to knock doors, you'll see that sometimes it's actually rather confusing as to triple decker that's been divided, if it's got four apartments in it, you know, they don't all necessarily have clearly marked mailboxes. So they may not get email, they may not get mail, and it's hard to knock on their door. Is the person being reached at all? But then there's the next question is do I have the capacity to respond? Do I have a disability? Can I read? Am I blind? Do I have some other disability that makes it hard for me to respond? That's an issue. And we heard more about that. We heard a testimony from somebody from the Perkins School about that issue. And that's actually another kind of undercounting. 

Will: 22:18

But I think the most common problem out there right now is simply trust, right? We do a lot of work telling people don't trust something that comes into your email box, right. Do not click and provide your social security number to somebody who sends you an email, because that's how people get scammed, right. Be real careful. So all the messaging, you know, most of the time to people is be extremely careful about what you do in response to an email. And by the way, mail too. And by the way, somebody coming to your door. I mean, we're always reminding people of the dangers of scams and so forth out there. Somebody sent me a note the other day from this was an email, of course, which I did open, knowing it was from a constituent. I open all my emails, I have to. But she was like, I got a thing talking about my Social Security COLA. It told me to click, should I open it? Now, in fact, this is a 100% valid email from the Social Security Administration. They do do outreach by email and encourage people to come in and sign on their site. But you never know, and people are very understandably and very appropriately paranoid.

Matt: 23:25

So this really kind of highlights the importance of the trusted community leaders to get all this information out.

Will: 23:32

Exactly. That's exactly right. So I mean, there's that don't trust the scam possibility, and then there's just people who don't trust government because of their contacts with government. They don't trust government because they come from a place where you can't trust government. They don't trust government because they do have concerns about their documentation status. Or they don't trust government, and these could be U.S. citizens who just have had a bad relationship with the law and bad relationship with government generally and just, you know, kind of stick to their own business and try to stay out of the way. And there's plenty of those, especially in lower income communities. So there's a whole lot of outreach that needs to be done. And that's what this hearing was about. There's just plenty of people that, for a variety of reasons, are going to be very, very cautious about filling out a census form. And that's especially true in this census cycle and especially true in immigrant communities. Let's just go back and play a clip now about that trust issue, because even if things are different in 2030 politically and from an immigration policy standpoint, you know, a lot of leaders kind of perceive the damage is done. I mean, trust is very, very hard to build, but it's very, very easy to destroy. Let's listen to Patricia Sobalvarro from Agencia ALPHA.

Patricia Sobalvarro: 24:51

So I asked myself, how are we going to do this outreach work? The reality is very different and is very real. We are living under this constant fear. People are understand that the, you know, the mass deportation, mass deportations is the reality of their everyday. There's this high impression of ICE enforcement in East Boston. Our agencies have had to invest in cameras, in these ring cameras because we can't let anybody just enter our offices. So if before were people afraid and mistrusting of the government, it is obvious that this sense of mistrust is even greater. The damage is already done, and I can't emphasize that enough. If before we were relying on volunteers to go out and talk to people, believe me, people are not going to want to do that anymore. And, you know, we all have heard the phrase, well, there's a great number of community members who live in the shadows. Maybe right now we want people to stay in the shadows, right?

Will: 26:02

One of the things that I came to appreciate listening to immigrant leaders is I don't think most people necessarily differentiate very clearly between the different levels of government. We've got local government, we've got state government, and we've got the federal government. And I know as a legislator that people come to me all the time and, you know, ask me to vote against some federal bill. You know, that's not clear in even U.S. citizens' minds. If you're talking about people who are just arriving in this country, who have not gone through all of the education, you know, the level of confusion about who's who is very great. And so it's uncomfortable to realize that as trust is lost with the federal government, trust is lost with all government officials. So that it becomes harder for those of us in state and local government who generally tend to think, well, okay, immigration, that's a federal issue, and they got to do what they got to do, and they're gonna do what they're gonna do, and we can push back, but it is what it is. But we at the state and local level are trying to help people, but that differentiation is not really very clear in the minds of many people in the community, and that was kind of heartbreaking. 

Will: 27:10

So, yeah, so the challenge in 2020 was big, and the undercount was huge in 2020. And what we're hearing, every indication is that the undercounts in the immigrant community at least is going to be likely even greater. So we have to be thinking about how we do the best job we can, not only in the immigrant community, but in every other historically undercounted community. So what we heard in the hearing was that the money and the organizational efforts started too late in 2020. We heard that, you know, these nonprofit organizations who are going to go out and sort of knock doors and have a street presence, do a table at a community event, have somebody in a Paul Revere costume handing out census forms, you know, that kind of thing, just getting out in the community. These organizations need time to staff up. So you can't just give them the money at the start of the census year. Additionally, there's a lot of organizational stuff to do. So, you know, to think about how to do it right. You don't want people tripping over each other. We got some testimony at that. You know, I'm going knocking on a door and somebody else has already knocked on that door. And then you have questions of how you structure it, what's the oversight. Some organizations complain that they got too much oversight. Just, you know, give us the money so we can get out and get some boots on the ground. Don't have us responding to oversight requests as much. Of course, that's a perennial thing in every every management situation. 

Will: 28:43

But so we got a lot of feedback that it's right for us to start thinking about the address list right now, and it's the right thing to start thinking about how to build out the organizational outreach so that we can do the actual count and actually people will actually respond. You know, that's what we're struggling with right now. That's what we're thinking about right now is how do we support legislatively the build out. In the last cycle, the legislature did not put any money in place until the end of July in 2019. At that point, we put a lot of structure on the money. We wanted to make sure it was well spent. We required a careful grant process and all kinds of accountability. And we want to do that. But the consequence of that was that the money didn't actually go out until around, even after January 2020. Some organizations didn't get their money until sometime in the first quarter of 2020. And that meant that they didn't have time to staff up and they didn't have time to sort of get organized and coordinate in an intelligent way. And we want to avoid that in this cycle. 

Will: 29:43

So, what I believe we need to do is put some money in place in the 2027 budget. In other words, three years earlier. So next year, July 2026, put some money in place. By the way, the Secretary of State is a great leader on this. He's the guy that's really been, I think, doing a great job of leading the state on this issue for quite a few years and has an understanding and a staff that has an understanding of all these challenges. But I think we need to get him started earlier on putting that grant structure in place. And I think one of the sort of cross-cutting challenges is how do we structure this? How do we coordinate it? You know, there's the nonprofit organizations that are oriented to particular populations that represent the, you know, the Cambodian group, the Brazilian group, the Central American groups, Black American groups, African American groups, disability groups. You know, you've got nonprofits that are focused on particular kinds of people or people with particular characteristics, then you have municipalities, which are organized differently, right? They're a geography, they're part of a municipal structure. And how do you sort of weave together those two kinds of organizations? You know, the community group might be centered in a municipality, or they might be centered on an ethnicity that spans multiple municipalities. How do you coordinate? If I've given money to the city of Lowell, well, how do they also give money to the Cambodian organization in the city of Lowell? And how do those two work together? 

Will: 31:08

So that's, I think, one of the things we're struggling to think through. I tend to think it's good to have a very strong presence in the municipalities, especially the gateway cities. You know, so I'd like to see us supporting the gateway cities and having number one, that address capability, and number two, somebody in place to start thinking about how they're going to interface with the nonprofits that are in their community or might be outside their community, but serving their community. So that's what we're trying to weave together right now. And hopefully we'll have something in place for the 2026 budget and talking to a lot of folks about that.

Matt: 31:40

Yeah. Just a quick thing there. Can you explain the gateway cities?

Will: 31:43

Sorry. Yeah, no, gateway cities are the 25 or 30 cities that have relatively less expensive housing and tend to be places where low-income people live in a greater concentration and especially immigrant low-income people. So, you know, Brockton, Fitchburg, Lowell, Lawrence, Fall River, these are gateway cities.

Matt: 32:05

Gotcha. Well, got your work cut out for you. Thanks for giving us this update on what you've been doing with the work and the path ahead and the challenges, and hope everyone got some good insights from this, or at least got some insights into some of the challenges and the stories of people in the community. So that's it for this episode. If you'd like to join in the conversation, please head on over to Will Brownsberger.com. As this is an ongoing conversation, Will would love to hear your thoughts on the issue and how it's affecting you. And you can subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, so you can know when the next episode is out, or where Will will continue to dive into the issues and share his thoughts on them. Thank you for listening and take care.