POLITICS
Communities That Count
Undocumented and immigrant residents grapple with the 2020 Census under Trump BY JOCELYN VEGA
D
uring a two-hour drive through residential blocks in La Villita on April 1, a string of cars beeped and passengers cheered from their side windows as they rolled from Cicero Avenue to 26th and California. Volunteers and staff from the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), Enlace Chicago, and Taller de Jose organized the event to increase awareness of the 2020 Census and motivate community members to increase La Villita’s census self-response rates. Mateo Uribe Ríos from ICIRR explained that the caravan was “how we get the word out” as a result of COVID-19 social distancing measures. “I want folks to take the census because there's more that we gain, and there's a lot to lose if we don’t,” he said. Uribe Ríos is a census coordinator for ICIRR, where he works with sixty-three organizations to mobilize census efforts within immigrant communities across Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. He supports partnerships between many community organizations, including United African Organization, Arab American Family Services, Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community, and Centro de Trabajadores Unidos. He coordinates community efforts to get out the count, while acknowledging the barriers that make those communities hard to count in the first place. In some ways, working as a census coordinator is an unlikely step for Uribe Ríos. When he was younger, he learned of his undocumented status during sophomore year of high school and therefore didn’t want to be involved with civic engagement. “I always stayed away from getting involved when I was younger, because I didn't see a point,” Uribe Ríos said. “I just didn’t see how I [could] get involved. I couldn’t vote. When I turned eighteen, I knew I could not. I thought that I couldn’t go to a public university. I thought these things were 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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distant from me, and [that] made me feel more separate from the country...It’s always feeling like [having] one foot in the door and the other one out.” Growing up in Berwyn, Uribe Ríos said “my barriers as a person who was new to America and U.S. culture” were compounded by denial of opportunities and colorism at a failing school district that deteriorated his confidence. Transferring school districts to Riverside opened his eyes to the uneven resources that different communities received and the possibilities that civic engagement could still bring. “I simply had to move to the other side of Harlem Avenue in order for my life to change completely,” Uribe Ríos said.
“These folks are not hard-to-count on purpose.” As he got older, Uribe Ríos witnessed undocumented youth events and political mobilization in favor of immigration reform. “I remember watching C-SPAN and Univision and looking at those votes for the DREAM Act, having high hopes but then seeing it fail. And so for me, I wanted to do something,” Uribe Ríos said. In 2010, he witnessed one of the very first undocumented youth rallies, where youth came out as “undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic.” The timing of this youthled rally also coincided with the last census. “I didn’t know what was at stake,” Uribe Ríos said, “but I know now that the census means something. It means that my presence is being known.” With shelter-in-place in effect ICIRR’s partner organizations have decided to hold off on door knocking, but they are still finding ways to inform communities, such as dropping off literature. On June 1, ICIRR
will be hosting an immigrants and refugee census day. “I’ve been letting our partners know that we can still do the work, but we got to take care of ourselves if we want to advocate for our community,” Uribe Ríos said. Despite community efforts, these same communities are often labelled “hardto-count.” This term refers to historically low response rates, as well as difficulty in increasing participation through outreach efforts. Many hard-to-count communities have populations that are under four years old, living in poverty, racial minorities, unhoused, renters, densely populated, or living in informal settlements. As a result of being under-counted, communities risk losing funding allocations, political representation, and community resources. However, labelling communities as hard-to-count carries implications that often do not reflect the communities’ experiences. Census terminology frames these communities as the difficult party, instead of recognizing oppression that has been experienced by those communities and continues to exist. “These folks are not hard-to-count on purpose,” Uribe Ríos said. “These are populations that have been historically marginalized by the government, so they are persuaded to not take the census.” He described how historical and current inequalities can influence an individual’s perception when encountering the census, how it’s an entire, deliberate process of weighing risks and past experiences. “We’re talking [about the] large scheme of things, systemic oppression,” Uribe Ríos said. “Folks within the undocumented community have reasons for not trusting the government with this information,” he said. “This information has been used wrongfully...This information was used to track Japanese Americans and Japaneseborn folks during the times of the internment camps of the 1940s.” Since then, under Title 13 of the U.S. code, census data has protected
personal, identifiable information. However, communities fear history repeating itself in light of current anti-immigrant practices. “Undocumented folks like us have to maintain a certain level of distance from the government, and then the census is inviting us back for the count,” Uribe Ríos said. A recent example is the proposed citizenship question that was barred from the 2020 Census. Lingering confusion over whether the question would appear, as well as fears regarding how personal and household data might be utilized in the future, creates a mistrust of the government. Heightened policing in immigrant communities with ICE surveillance, raids, deportations, and emerging detention centers for undocumented children has further exacerbated those tensions. Uribe Ríos said that it shouldn’t be up to undocumented communities themselves to overcome concerns regarding misused information that has targeted them. “The government is [asking for] this step forward—but [the government] won't step forward for you. And it’s not fair,” Uribe Ríos said. “The government is not civically engaging us. Our educational system is not engaged with us. Our workplaces, our healthcare, our cultural understanding of immigrants, is not getting engaged with us. We’re not fully included into all of these systems.” Uribe Ríos said that this lack of inclusion can “prevent communities from seeing the census to the full extent of its effect on our communities.” He pointed to the contradiction between the census outreach promotion of benefits while, “at the same time, the government is also doing things that discourages us from receiving those benefits the other nine years of the decade,” such as lack of equitable school investment, trouble maintaining community infrastructure, and the persistent need for social services. “When it comes to this relationship
