ATLANTA - Nearly 120,000 Georgians were missed in the census two years ago, according to estimates released reluctantly Friday by the Census Bureau.
According to the report, the Census undercounted the number of Georgia Hispanics, a classification separate from race, by slightly more than 19,000 people.
More than 57,000 whites and some 48,000 blacks also weren't counted in the original tally, according to the data released Friday.
The agency said it was under a federal court order to make the data public but believed the figures were flawed and have no official use.
The new data showed Georgia with a population of 8,306,305 in 2000, up 119,852, or 1.5 percent, from the 8,186,453 the Census Bureau originally reported.
Doug Bachtel, a University of Georgia demographer, said he believes the Hispanic undercount is far larger than that. The revised numbers of Hispanics in Georgia is 454,360, or about 5 percent. Bachtel said he believes it is twice that number.
``Ever since the first Census in 1790 we haven't really been able to get the total picture,'' he said. ``It's just too difficult to do and, given this incredible mobility, it's really difficult to pin people down.''
Many groups, especially immigrants, come from homes where the government is viewed with suspicion and have no incentive to participate in the count, he said. Others are here illegally and don't want that fact known.
Sen.-elect Sam Zamarripa, a Mexican-American and one of three Hispanics elected to next year's Legislature, said the Hispanic undercount should be obvious. ``You don't need a census to tell you the world has changed. People can see it for themselves.''
Robert Giacomini, a spokesman for Georgia's State Data Center, said it's good news if the undercount was just 1.5 percent.
``It's actually a substantial improvement over the undercount in 1990, which was 2.2 percent,'' he said.
Giacomini said the state invested time and money in an advertising campaign before the Census to make sure everyone knew the importance of being counted. That seems to have paid off, he said.
Census data is used in a variety of formulas for dispensing federal and state grants and for redrawing legislative and congressional district lines.
For those reasons, Democrats and many civil rights groups pressed the Census Bureau to release its estimate of the number of people missed in the count. The agency resisted until a federal appeals court in Oregon ordered the data released.
In releasing the data, the agency refused to vouch for its accuracy, saying its own analysis showed the material was ``so severely flawed that all potential uses ... would be inappropriate.''
Saturday
May 4th, 2024
9:55PM
