Census hiring temp workers, including some immigrants; researcher has suggestions to increase rural compliance - Entrepreneur Generations

The U.S. Census Bureau is hiring about 50,000 temporary workers across the country to carry out preliminary work for the 2020 population count; the bureau plans to hire about 500,000 workers next year to do the actual count. All of that will bump up employment levels across the nation, Reade Pickert reports for Bloomberg.

The law usually stipulates that federal agencies may only employ citizens, but the bureau is using a loophole to temporarily hire non-citizens in order to reach hard-to-count populations, such as non-English speaking and immigrant communities, Lauren Camera reports for U.S. News & World Report.

Better counts in immigrant areas could help many rural agricultural areas. That's important because rural America has a lot riding on the census, but is at a higher risk of being undercounted, John Green writes for The Conversation. Green is a sociology professor at the University of Mississippi and director of the university's Center for Population Studies.

In rural areas, the lower participation rate stems from various barriers to participation, including lack of awareness and distrust of the government. The bureau's new strategy of offering the census primarily online will probably further lower turnout because of limited internet access in many areas, Green writes.

One way rural communities can increase local census compliance: "people can form or join Complete Count Committees which promote an accurate count of the population in their communities," Green writes. "For example, participants might coordinate census promotion campaigns within churches, or develop community celebrations that feature the civic duty of census participation."

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2ZA5RPj Census hiring temp workers, including some immigrants; researcher has suggestions to increase rural compliance - Entrepreneur Generations

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