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Friday, August 30, 2019

Census hiring temp workers, including some immigrants; researcher has suggestions to increase rural compliance

The Census Bureau is hiring about 50,000 temporary workers to carry out preliminary work for the 2020 population count; it plans to hire about 500,000 workers next year to do the actual count. That will bump up employment across the nation, Reade Pickert reports for Bloomberg.

Federal law says agencies may only employ citizens, but the bureau is using a loophole to temporarily hire non-citizens in order to reach hard-to-count populations, such as non-English speaking and immigrant communities, Lauren Camera reports for U.S. News & World Report.

Better counts in immigrant-heavy areas could help some rural, agricultural areas. That's important because rural America has a lot riding on the census, but is at a higher risk of being undercounted, John Green writes for The Conversation. Green is a sociology professor at the University of Mississippi and director of the university's Center for Population Studies.

In rural areas, lower census participation stems from various barriers, including lack of awareness and distrust of the government. The bureau's new strategy of offering the census primarily online will probably further lower turnout because of limited internet access in many areas, Green writes.

One way rural communities can increase local census compliance: "people can form or join Complete Count Committees which promote an accurate count of the population in their communities," Green writes. "For example, participants might coordinate census promotion campaigns within churches, or develop community celebrations that feature the civic duty of census participation."

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