Panel Says Census Move on Arab-Americans Recalls World War II
Internments
By ERIC LIPTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/10/politics/10census.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
The Census Bureau's decision to give to the Department of Homeland
Security data that identified populations of Arab-Americans was the
modern-day equivalent of its pinpointing Japanese-American communities
when internment camps were opened during World War II, members of an
advisory board told the agency's top officials Tuesday.
"This for the Arab-American community is 1942," said Barry Steinhardt,
a civil liberties lawyer and member of the panel, the Decennial Census
Advisory Committee. "Thousands of Arab-Americans have been rounded up
and deported."
The criticism came at a daylong special meeting held at the Census
Bureau's headquarters in this Washington suburb to discuss the
disclosure this summer that on two occasions after the attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, the agency provided comprehensive reports to Homeland
Security listing Arab-American populations by city and ZIP code.
The data, from the 2000 census, had already been made public on the
agency's Internet site and did not include any individual names or
addresses, information the agency is prohibited from disclosing.
Further, Homeland Security officials have said the data were requested
simply to help them decide at which airports they needed to post
Arabic language signs, not for law enforcement purposes.
But the Census Bureau director acknowledged at the meeting that by
tabulating and handing over the data to the Department of Homeland
Security, even if doing so broke no laws , the agency had undermined
public trust, potentially discouraging Arab-Americans or other
minority groups from filling out future census forms.
"It affected the perception of the Census Bureau," said the director,
Charles Louis Kincannon. "And that is a very important problem for
us."
But Mr. Kincannon rejected comparisons to what occurred during World
War II, when the bureau gave maps and statistics to the Army
identifying where Japanese-Americans lived.
"This is not 1942," he said. "That kind of internment is not going
on."
The meeting largely drew leaders of a variety of ethnic and racial
groups, some of them members of the committee, and the criticism there
was voiced by many other than Arab-Americans. Representatives of
Asians, Hispanics, blacks, American Indians and Native Alaskans each
objected to the agency's action.
"Once you lose the trust of the public, it is hard to get it back,"
said Karen Narasaki, a member of the committee who said her parents
and grandparents were sent to internment camps during World War II.
Concern was also raised about a new effort by the Census Bureau to
prepare annual estimates of illegal immigrants as part of an overall
population count. Those estimates, a recent report by the Government
Accountability Office said, may permit approximate counts by
geographic area of the number of illegal-immigrant children of school
age, data that members of the committee said might ultimately be used
against migrant families.
But Mr. Kincannon said that if the Census Bureau wanted to report
population sizes accurately, it needed to try to count fast-growing
immigrant and illegal-immigrant populations.
"It is in our interest and the public's interest to have a good
estimate," he said.
Since the disclosure over the summer that the data were given to the
Homeland Security Department, the Census Bureau has already changed
the way it handles requests from law enforcement agencies for special
tabulations of census data or extractions of data already tabulated.
Before any such information is now released, a senior administrator
must approve the request. Requests that involve some "sensitive''
populations - children, noncitizens, prisoners, the poor, the
terminally ill and certain "small minority groups" - also require that
high-level approval even if the data are not being shared with a law
enforcement agency.
But several members of the advisory board said the new rule was too
ambiguous, particularly when it came to determining which minorities
were considered "sensitive." One solution suggested by committee
members Tuesday would be to release to the public any special
tabulations prepared for law enforcement agencies, so that there would
be less suspicion about what kind of data the Census Bureau might be
sharing. Others urged the creation of a kind of ombudsman - a "privacy
officer" who would routinely review these kinds of data requests.
Mr. Kincannon said he expected to issue a more permanent and
comprehensive revision of rules in this area next year, to try to
rebuild public confidence.
"To conduct the census,'' he said, "we depend on the trust of the
respondents.''
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