Monday, November 2, 2009

¡Hágase Contar!

Probably the single-most important factor which may contribute to an undercount in the 2010 Census is citizenship status. The Census Bureau estimates that there are 21.6 million non-citizen residents -- an increase of 3 million non-citizens over the 18.6 million reported in the 2000 Census.

The interactive table below shows the percentage of non-citizens for all places in the United States with a current population of 20,000 or more -- based on estimates from the 2006 to 2008 American Community Survey (ACS) released last week by the Census Bureau.

At 41.6%, Hialeah, Florida has the highest non-citizen percentage, with about 86,000 non-citizen residents. New York City has the largest non-citizen population -- about 1.48 million persons (17.8%).

You can search, sort, and filter the data in the table.


View expanded table

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2006-2008 American Community Survey, Table C05001.
Link to ACS tables
Data are based on a sample and are subject to sampling variability. Data are not available for some places because the number of sample cases is too small.

The interactive table below shows the same dataset for all counties with a population of 20,000 or more.


View expanded table

Hendry County, Florida and Miami-Dade County, Florida lead the pack with populations that are over 25 percent non-citizen.

The Census Bureau will not release ACS citizenship estimates for small jurisdictions (under 20,000 pop.) and census tracts until late 2010.

If you need street-level detail, the interactive map described in our July 23, 2009 blog post includes a block-group level thematic map showing the percentage of non-citizens, according to the 2000 census. At a scale of about 5 miles, the block group count of non-citizens (as of April 1, 2000) is displayed in purple boxes.(A related map in this application shows the percentage of the voting age population in 2000 that did not speak English "very well".)

You can also overlay tract-level citizenship info from Stanford's gCensus onto our Hard-to-Count census tract Google Maps using the technique described in this Google Earth Forum post (with map links).