Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Even the decennial official count has issues. By law, they have to count every person, but not all people have similar response rates. For example, illegal immigrants have horrible response rates. Blacks and Hispanics, college students, formerly incarcerated, renters and a whole host of groups have bad response rates. The best response rates are among homeowners, seniors and "traditional" nuclear families.
So you can say "it's the same rules for everyone" but if, say, one jurisdiction has few undocumented residents and another has many, you can see that an equal application of the rules doesn't result in equally accurate data.
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Crawford,
Exactly!!! It frustrates the hell out of me when folks defend the Census in this area or talk about how the results aren't shared with any other agency. The undocumented populations are actively going to avoid filling out the census forms and avoid the enumerators.
The Census knows they undercount certain urban population areas, but are prohibited from using statistical adjustments to better account for the population because their is a political debate about enumeration and that a more accurate count would benefit the urban cities more.
The Census is good at counting traditional residences, but rooming houses, shelters, informal dwellings, even newly constructed housing is often missed as well.
I'm convinced that NYC already hit 9,000,000 people back in 2010, and probably has even more people today, but it's IMPOSSIBLE to accurately count everyone due to the reasons associated with dense, urban areas with high immigrant populations.