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Who Are We? Why Are We Here?

By Charles Bierbauer/CNN

WASHINGTON (April 4)--Just how much do we need to know about each other?

How do you get to work?

Do you speak a language other than English at home?

Have you ever been on active military duty?

How many bedrooms do you have?

Or would name, age, sex, relationship, race, Hispanic origin and own or rent a home suffice?

The latter makes up the short form questionnaire for Census 2000. Everyone in the U.S. will be asked those seven questions. One in six households will get the longer 34-question form which wants to know more about where we live, work and come from.

The U.S. Bureau of the Census is preparing forms for the next round of official inquisitiveness. Which leads us to ask them: Why now?

Because Congress, though not itself known for getting things done in a very timely fashion, required the census folk to submit their proposed questions three years ahead of the date when the once-a-decade snapshot of America will be taken. That's on April 1, 2000.

Since the Census Bureau met its deadline this week, you and I can start boning up on the answers. You don't think the government would make anything simple do you?

Actually, they are trying. The 2000 census forms will be a couple of questions shorter than it was in 1990.

Why? Congress said so, that's why. The elected officials don't want to burden their constituents with too much paperwork. It must already be too much of a bother since compliance with the form has dropped steadily every ten years and was down to 65 percent last time. That's not good enough.

"For every percentage point of people who don't mail back the form, we add $25 million to the cost of the census," says census director Martha Farnsworth Riche. It costs $2 to process each mailed form, but $12 for each family which has to be tracked down in person by a census taker. The bureau's statisticians need to achieve 90 percent compliance before they can extrapolate the rest. The Census Bureau plans a $100 million advertising budget to persuade people to save time and money by mailing in the forms.

To count the estimated 274 million who will be living in the U.S. in the year 2000 will cost $4 billion as it is.

Doesn't all this info already exist in government computers somewhere? Perhaps in those $4 billion worth of Internal Revenue Service computers that don't work?

"It's not out there in one comparable snapshot," says Riche.

Why do we do this every 10 years anyhow?

Article I of the Constitution of the United States. Those founding fathers decreed that the "Enumeration" take place "every subsequent Term of ten Years" in order to determine the number of representatives each state should have. No more. No less.

But curiosity got the better of government officials from the start. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson began adding other questions as early as 1790. The 2000 census, with just seven questions to be asked of everyone, will be the shortest since 1820.

The data has become critical not just to the federal government, but also to state and local governments. It becomes the basis for allocating federal aid. Cities are particularly vulnerable to undercounting. The urban poor are less likely to send in the forms and more difficult to find in the face-to-face count.

This won't come off without controversy will it? Of course not.

One question the Census Board has left for the Office of Management and Budget to decide. When asked the question of race, should people have the option of declaring themselves "multiracial"? The answers may surprise you.

The choices now are: White, Black, American Indian, Asian or Pacific Islander or Other. Many of mixed race don't find "other" a satisfying way to think of themselves. That's not surprising.

Strongest opposition to adding a multiracial choice comes from the African-American community. Having strengthened blacks' identity, it is fearful of losing numerical strength to the multiracial category.

Asian-Americans and Native Americans are more likely, though, than African-Americans to see their numbers eroded, according to census director Riche. Though there are nine million American Indians -- the 10th largest ethnic group -- they are the most likely to be of mixed race. That's why many tribes have wrestled with the question of whether 1/32 Indian blood counts as Indian. Moreover, in a sample survey only two percent claimed the multiracial option.

African-Americans were, in fact, the fourth largest ethnic group counted in the 1990 census. Beyond race, a further census question asks ancestry or ethnic origin.

Nearly one in four Americans claims German ancestry. With my name, I could claim that. But you are mostly what you think you are. Watch how complicated this all gets.

On my father's German side there was an adoption, likely also of German ancestry, but who can say for sure?

English-Americans come in fourth in number -- 13 percent. But mother's family really came from Cornwall, that westward stretch of the British Isles reaching toward the Americas. Cornish don't answer to English.

Yet ethnicity is important even in this melting pot. In the 1990 census only 5 percent identified themselves as simply "American".

So think about it. You've still got time.

The Census Bureau is also getting with the times. The results of Census 2000 will be available on the Internet sometime in the year 2001. That is, if the government figures out how to deal with the millennial glitch that could render computers unable to discern the year 2000 from 1900.

How did that happen? That's a question you can not hang on the founding fathers.