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Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines “side by side” as the state “of existing beside one another” and “of being in the same place, time, or circumstance." What does it mean for rural and urban communities to live side by side? Join University of Minnesota Extension staff as we explore the interdependent relationship of rural and urban spaces and why this necessary and complex relationship matters.
In a recent conversation for an upcoming episode, I spoke with Ryan Allen, Jose Pacas, and Allison Liuzzi about their work estimating the size of immigrant and refugee communities and where they live across the country and here in Minnesota. Their work helps us better understand where foreign born communities have settled in rural urban and suburban areas. Ryan is an urban planning professor at the University of Virginia and was with the University of Minnesota Humphrey School for over a decade. Jose is a researcher at the Constellation Fund and previously worked at the U. S.
Ellen Wolter:Census Bureau. Allison is program director at Minnesota Compass which provides extensive data on Minnesota communities, including our state's foreign born and cultural communities. I'll be sharing the full conversation with Ryan, Jose, and Allison about their research and its connection to rural urban and suburban communities in an upcoming episode of Side by Side. But this week, I wanted to share an excerpt from our conversation that focuses on the data behind their research, The U. S.
Ellen Wolter:Decennial Census and American Community Survey. The U. S. Decennial Census and American Community Survey are important sources of information for researchers like Ryan, Jose, Allison, as well as for community organizations, planners, and local and state governments. Without these data, researchers would be unable to provide the detailed estimates they do about who lives in Minnesota and nationally.
Ellen Wolter:As Allison explains, these data are a mirror. They reflect back who we are as communities, and that reflection depends on how data are collected and who is counted. There have been recent proposals to change how census data are collected and who is counted. These changes raise questions about the importance of the census and what it means for how we understand who lives in urban, rural and suburban communities across the country. You can learn more about the proposed changes to the census and their potential impacts in a recent webinar hosted by Wilder Research and Minnesotans for the American Community Survey.
Ellen Wolter:I've included a link in the show notes. Here's my conversation with Ryan Allen, Jose Pacas, and Allison Liuzzi. We talk about the constitutional foundation of the census, the value of these data for understanding our communities, and what's at stake when the way we collect data or who gets counted changes.
Jim Griswold (Music):When they've all had their quarrels imparted, we'll be the same as we started, just to travel along, singing a song, side by side.
Ellen Wolter:This is Ellen Wolter, and welcome to the Side by Side podcast. Could you... Could anybody, feel free to jump in, describe the difference between the census, the decennial census, and the American Community Survey, and what the distinction is and why it's important?
Ryan Allen:I'm gonna let the two card carrying demographers answer that one.
Allison Liuzzi:The Decennial Census, we do it every ten years. Everyone is asked to fill it out. Lately, it's been about 10 questions that you complete for every individual living in your household. It asks questions like age, race, ethnicity, very, very basic, but those counts are then fed into really important decisions like representation, voting, districting. And so our next one is coming up in 2030.
Allison Liuzzi:Our last one was in 2020. It used to be the case alongside the Decennial Census, you know, we'd send out this form to every household with about 10 questions, let's say, a sample, a smaller number of households would receive what we kind of called the long form which asked a whole bunch more questions like the ones that Jose talked about, immigration status, employment, income. And so then every ten years we would get additional data for a sample, a smaller group of household that we would then learn more detail about some things that are important to us like poverty. That went away and was replaced by the American Community Survey around 2005 is when we started getting really kind of good reliable estimates from it. So no more long form during the Decennial Census.
Allison Liuzzi:American Community Survey comes in starting around 2005, sends out a survey similar to the long form every year to a sample of about, about 1% of households across The US. And now that means we get annual data, 2005, 2006, 2007, that's really detailed, that gives us more granular data on really important trends like immigration, like poverty, like income. When even that 1% of households isn't enough, sometimes we combine years, and we'll take 2005 through 2009 to talk about really small subgroups where one year of data wouldn't be reliable, but combining five years of data gives us more information. So really, really important source of information for folks like Ryan and Jose and me to understand trends in immigration, but also really important source of information for communities to understand who they are, see themselves reflected back in data in terms of population size and employment and economy and wages, and transportation needs. So county planning agencies use it, funders use it, libraries, schools use it to understand enrollment numbers.
Allison Liuzzi:So super important source of information that then is complemented by our every ten years decennial census, which wouldn't give us that sort of magnifying glass into people's lives. Jose, how did I how did I do?
Jose Pacas:Amazing. And and I I I wanna, if I may, just geek out a little bit more and make this even more exciting beyond the data geeks that we are. It's so important, the Decennial Census, that our founders put it into the constitution. So I'd just remind everybody that the first census that ever happened was in 1790. And just to get a little bit of a history lesson, if we go into the US constitution, look at article one section two.
Jose Pacas:That's literally how important this decennial census is to our democratic government. We're trying to figure out how many representatives do we need to have in this country. Well, we need to know how many people there are in this country. And so section two, I'm gonna read the the line aloud. The actual enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the congress of the US and within every subsequent term of ten years.
Jose Pacas:This is mandated by our constitution. It is integral to it. The other thing I'd add about the move from the Decennial Census to the American Community Survey, that long form that Allison was talking about, that was given to 10% of the population. And to put it simply, the logic was, well, instead instead of waiting ten years to figure out 10% of the population, why don't we wait one year to find out 1% of that population and go from there?
Ryan Allen:The only other thing that I would underscore and what my colleagues have already mentioned is the timeliness of the American Community Survey is such an important aspect of it. Because once upon a time, when we had the decennial census and that was the source of information on The US population, When you got nine years out from when the last census occurred, there was a fair amount of uncertainty that those numbers that you were relying on were still relevant and reflective of the population. I think that's one of the reasons and the main reason that this innovation around the American Community Survey is such an important and valuable thing that the US government does.
Ellen Wolter:Could you understand where folks are living across the state that are foreign born without this data? Is there another data source you could use?
Jose Pacas:No. I think we're all shaking our heads. It hasn't been enough.
Allison Liuzzi:No. Not at the level of detail that we're able to get information back to communities. On our Minnesota Compass project, on our website, we have thousands and thousands of charts and data tables and visualizations. I don't know the actual number, but my ballpark is that three quarters of those rely on American Community Survey data. Now, if the data became less reliable or if they went away, we would need to pivot and would find other data sources to come in, but they wouldn't be as good.
Allison Liuzzi:They wouldn't be as timely as Ryan says. They wouldn't be as complete a picture as we've gotten used to seeing through these data. It's just such a huge valuable resource to researchers, but to all of us. Again, data reflects human lives, lived experiences back to people. We need to understand ourselves.
Allison Liuzzi:And ACS is, at least right now, one of the best sources, quantitative sources we have for understanding our communities.
Ryan Allen:I mean, there's lots of private data out there, but none of it none of it has the scale and scope of what the US Census Bureau does. On top of that, if we relied on private sector actors to provide this kind of data, there's two big issues. One is it would no longer be free for researchers like us to use. Think about a really small scale shop research group that doesn't have the resources to pay for this kind of stuff. It would be really, really difficult for them to do the good science that I think many of the small researchers out there do.
Ryan Allen:Right? That's one issue. The second issue is that private actors don't have the same requirements around In fact, they would have a big incentive to not be very transparent about how they're doing their data collection because it becomes proprietary at that point. They're a private actor. Right?
Ryan Allen:That is not true with the US government. They have to exercise a lot of transparency in how they're collecting the data and why it's valid. They have to demonstrate that. And so, those are two reasons, and there are many more, of why it would be a phenomenally bad idea to entrust this kind of data collection to actors that are not the US government or other aspects of the government and instead are in it for profit motivation or some other motivation.
Ellen Wolter:What are the federal protections around the data that's collected by the census and by by the ACS?
Jose Pacas:I used to work at the US Census Bureau in twenty fourteen to twenty sixteen in the poverty statistics branch. First, all the data that the Census Bureau receives is protected. And when it's delivered back to the Census Bureau, no one ever really gets to see the the names on those data. They they become anonymized. Even internally, all of us has to get what's called...
Jose Pacas:Well, the equivalent of security clearance where we take these title 13 and... And I'm forgetting. I take about five different tests every year to make sure that I basically have sworn to protect the confidentiality of every respondent that's in our datasets with the penalty of... I think it's up to $600,000 in seven years in prison, and that is for life. And and I take that very seriously to this day.
Jose Pacas:And everyone within the Census Bureau has to take that same pledge, and it is one of the most, if not the most sacrosanct thing about working at the Census Bureau. And that's the data coming in. Right? Data comes in, and then we analyze the stuff inside of there. But what comes out, and this is connecting to the American Community Survey, what comes out of the Census Bureau is a product called the Public Use Microdata Series.
Jose Pacas:There's a different set of tables that come out. That's not what we're working with. We're working with the Public Use Microdata Series, which is actually technically a sample of all the people they surveyed in a given year in the American Community Survey. The number Allison mentioned earlier, it's roughly 1%. It's about 1.3% of The US population that they sample.
Jose Pacas:Only 1% comes out in the American Community Survey Public Use files. Those files have basically undergone every level of privacy preserving techniques possible to make sure that no one can ever be identified within the data. Not unauthorized immigrants. This is anybody's data. And the lowest level of geography that is available in the American Community Survey is the Census Bureau denoted...
Jose Pacas:Created thing called a public use micro... Microdata area, which is draw a circle around a 100,000 people in the city. That is the lowest layer of data that you're gonna get. You're not gonna get a 100,000 people respondents within that area. It's like, in total, there are a 100,000 people here, and we're gonna give you information about some of those people.
Jose Pacas:There's no way for you to backtrack who that respondent is in the file back to an actual human being. And that's basically the limitation that we have kind of connecting it back to the urban rural discussion is one of the limitations there is North Dakota has six pumas. Right? Because there's around 600,000 people in North Dakota, so you don't really have a lot of geographic refinement in those areas. In a large city like Manhattan, you might have nine tumas or seven tumas.
Jose Pacas:I forget how large Manhattan is. So that creates a difficulty for the urban rural discussion. But, ultimately, this is all tying back to how important privacy is, is that even the ability to look at refined geographic areas is limited by how important it is to protect the privacy of the respondents.
Ellen Wolter:Stay tuned for the full episode with Ryan, Allison, and Jose in the coming weeks. We discuss immigration and its connection to rural urban and suburban communities. Thank you for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at sidebysideumn dot edu. Side by Side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Wolter.
Ellen Wolter:Special thanks to Jan Jekula, who designed our wonderful logo, and Jim Griswold, who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits.
Jim Griswold (Music):Really doesn't matter at all.
Ellen Wolter:You can find episodes of Side by Side wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back next week with another episode. I'm Ellen Wolter, and this is side by side.
Jim Griswold (Music):Singing a song side by side.