The 2020 census may have missed a big share of noncitizens, the bureau estimates - NPR
The Constitution requires a once-a-decade tally of the “whole number of persons in each state.” The population numbers are used to reallocate congressional seats and Electoral College votes, as well as guide some $1.5 trillion a year in federal money to local communities for public services.
But the bureau’s estimated tally of the U.S. population as of Census Day 2020, based on a simulated tally involving administrative records from government and third-party sources, was 2.3% higher than the count’s actual result of 331.4 million.
That gap, researchers found, was likely driven by noncitizen residents who are missing from the agency’s count, especially those with “unknown legal status.” About 19.7% of noncitizens tallied in the simulation using administrative records had addresses that could not be matched with those counted in the 2020 census.
That raises “the possibility that the 2020 Census did not succeed in collecting data for a significant fraction of noncitizens residing in the United States,” the bureau’s report says.
…
[The] researchers note that noncitizens are more likely than citizens to be living at addresses that the bureau’s workers did not try to contact for the 2020 census. Many of the noncitizens the bureau’s simulation tallied were living in group-style living quarters or buildings with multiple housing units and near the U.S.-Mexico border.
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