2000 Census

The census can be a hard sell in some Hispanic communities. Fears that the information illegal immigrants give to the census could lead to their deportation is partly responsible for Latinos being undercounted in the 2000 census by an estimated 3 percent. This year, a prominent Latino evangelical preacher with a radio show in 11 markets is encouraging undocumented immigrants to boycott the census to protest the lack of immigration reform. And a Mexican-American political organization has called for all Hispanics to boycott it. Against that backdrop, a coalition of prominent Latinos launched a nationwide campaign Thursday urging people to fill out the 2010 census forms.

The U.S. Census Bureau has revised upward by nearly 15,000 its most recent estimate of Baltimore's population - a change that indicates the city's loss of residents has dropped to its slowest pace in decades and that the city could be poised to reverse a half-century of population decline. The revised census figures - coming in response to a challenge by Baltimore officials - put the city's population as of July 1, 2003, at 643,304, compared with the original estimate of 628,670 released in April.

WASHINGTON -- The Census Bureau unveiled its first-ever paid advertising campaign yesterday as part of a $167 million effort to reach minority groups that have been missed in past national head counts.The campaign is aimed at reversing a 30-year trend toward fewer Americans completing and returning the census forms that are mailed out once a decade. The ads will target groups that have historically been undercounted: blacks, Latinos, American Indians and new immigrants from all countries.

WASHINGTON -- To cut costs and improve accuracy, the Census Bureau said yesterday that it would actually count only 90 percent of the United States population in 2000 and rely on statistical sampling methods to determine the number remaining.The plans, announced at the Commerce Department, mean that for the first time, the official tally of the U.S. population, done every 10 years and used to apportion seats in the House of Representatives, will be based in part on a scientifically determined estimate rather than the actual head count conducted through a massive direct mail campaign.

Maryland became a bigger, more suburban and more racially diverse state during the 1990s. The first detailed returns from the 2000 census show that the flight of white and black families from the largest cities continued, draining Baltimore and Washington of hefty chunks of their populations. At the same time, thousands more families - largely white - kept on going. They left or leapfrogged the inner suburbs, leaving them less white and more racially diverse than ever before. They built their new homes in former cornfields of the outer ring of suburban counties, bringing more-crowded roads and schools to once-rural landscapes from Harford in the north to Calvert in the south.

It is the government's biggest peacetime mobilization: Open hundreds of offices, hire an army of temporary employees and mail forms to 119 million housing units. The object: a statistical snapshot of who and where an estimated 274 million U.S. residents are on April 1, 2000.The census, the national head count that has been taken every decade since 1790, is still three years away, but a sense of urgency is already developing on Capitol Hill and at U.S. Census Bureau headquarters in Suitland.

Baltimore County's population has been increasing since the 2000 census, illustrating a trend that most U.S. cities are experiencing: the continuing urban exodus to the suburbs. The U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division estimated a drop of about 7,800 in city residents for the 12 months from July 2002 through June 2003. The 2004 report, Annual Estimate of the Population for Counties of Maryland, shows the population of Baltimore County as 780,821. That's 1,305 people per square mile, said the Census Bureau.

NEW YORK - The city with the largest American Indian population, according to the 2000 Census, is not Phoenix. Not Los Angeles. It is New York City. The news is a surprise even to some Indians living in the city. "You're kidding, right?" said Rosemary Richmond, the director of the American Indian Community House in Manhattan. The census counted 41,289 American Indians and Alaska natives living in the city in 2000. And although the Census Bureau's form allowed people to claim more than one race, helping increase the numbers from previous years, when the census counted those people who claimed only some American Indian or Alaska native heritage, New York City was still No. 1, with 87,241.

WASHINGTON -- After years of racial, ethnic, geographical and politically partisan conflict across the nation, the Supreme Court is about to enter the debate over how the American people will be counted in the year 2000.The U.S. Census Bureau, in pursuit of the accuracy that has eluded census takers throughout American history, has touched off a nationwide struggle over power and money by planning to use modern statistical sampling techniques on an unprecedented scale.On Monday the justices will hear arguments in two cases asking whether federal law or the Constitution bars the use of sampling in determining how many people live in each part of the United States.

In Washington these days, "Bush-Cheney" bumper stickers on cars with Texas license plates may be multiplying like mad. But back in the Lone Star State, the bumper sticker of the moment reflects a different demographic trend. It reads, "I wasn't born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could." After a close look at the first wave of numbers from the 2000 census, demographers have concluded that a dramatic population increase in Texas since 1990 is at least partly the result of people moving from other parts of the country in search of an easier lifestyle, a lower cost of living and a more hospitable climate.