The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, yet another contrivance of the Ford Foundation, is alarmed that the Census Bureau isn’t doing enough to ensure that Democrats get more seats in the House of Representatives:

“We have heard a lot of speeches by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and the census director saying the census is confidential. But speeches and Web postings do not have the force of law,” said Glenn Magpantay, an AALDEF program director, in a telephone interview. “Our concern is how much risk immigrants are putting themselves at.”
Other groups agree more work needs to be done.
“We are running the risk of a real undercount,” said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. “The next few weeks will be critical.”
The Census Bureau is printing instruction guides and sample forms in dozens of different languages for use in community help centers, since one in five residents speak a language other than English at home. But there have been errors due to poor translations, including material for Vietnamese speakers that describe the census as a “government investigation.”
The agency was able to correct its Web material two weeks ago after groups pointed out the problem, but it’s too late to fix the paper forms, according to the report. There are more than 1.1 million Vietnamese in the U.S., mostly clustered in California and Texas.
Other gaps included a lack of specialists for the Bangladeshi community in Detroit; the nation’s third largest Korean-American population in Chicago; and the south Asian and Cambodian groups in Philadelphia and Rhode Island. In Virginia, when groups cited a need for census specialists for their Korean and Vietnamese communities, the agency responded by hiring someone who spoke Chinese.

And this:

To encourage participation, Census Director Robert Groves on Monday visited neighborhoods along the U.S.-Mexico border near Laredo, Texas. As many as half the residents were missed there in 2000 because they had little knowledge of English and feared being turned over to immigration agents.

“Half the residents”? Obviously, the Census Bureau needs to make it as easy as practical to be counted so as to get an accurate enumeration. But if illegal aliens fear giving information to the goverment whose laws they’ve spat on, or if there aren’t enough Bangladeshi census-takers in Detroit, well, too bad.

On the plus side:

The Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, has made clear it will not ask the Homeland Security Department to hold off on large-scale raids as they successfully did in 2000. That has drawn consternation from immigrant groups, particularly as it has become unlikely that Congress will take up immigration reform this year.