{"id":378502,"date":"2022-10-27T06:02:34","date_gmt":"2022-10-26T20:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=378502"},"modified":"2022-10-27T06:02:34","modified_gmt":"2022-10-26T20:02:34","slug":"us-territory-reps-hope-congress-will-remedy-longstanding-data-gaps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/us-territory-reps-hope-congress-will-remedy-longstanding-data-gaps\/","title":{"rendered":"US territory reps hope Congress will remedy longstanding data gaps"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: Republished with permission. Originally published on https:\/\/www.civilbeat.org\/2022\/10\/us-territory-reps-hope-congress-will-remedy-longstanding-data-gaps\/<\/em><\/p>\n

Like many other parts of the U.S., the coronavirus pandemic brought the Northern Mariana Islands\u2019 economy skidding to a halt. Flights carrying tourists stopped, hotels closed and thousands were out of work. But when the federal government asked Vicky Benavente, the head of the territory\u2019s Labor Department, to estimate how many workers were unemployed, she wasn\u2019t sure.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s partially because unlike U.S. states, the federal government doesn\u2019t collect annual unemployment data from the Northern Marianas and other territories. Instead, the local government serving a population of about 47,000 conducts periodic surveys to figure out how many people are out of jobs. The last one was completed in 2017.<\/p>\n

The only way Benavente could estimate local job loss was by noting that the number of local employers submitting quarterly surveys fell from 1,000 to 600 in 2020\u2014a 40% drop in active businesses.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is one lesson we learned,\u201d Benavente said last week. \u201cData is so critical for justifying our asks to the federal government.\u201d<\/p>\n

Data collection could become easier under a bill\u00a0introduced in Congress this summer\u00a0by Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona, and the non-voting delegates representing the U.S. island territories.<\/p>\n

The measure known as the\u00a0Territories Statistics Collection Equity Act, would ask the Interagency Council on Statistical Policy to spend a year coming up with a plan to ensure federal data collection for U.S. territories is on par with states and fully implement its plan within four years.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe lag far behind the states in terms of priority, availability, timeliness and type of data collected,\u201d said Rep. Gregorio Kilili Sablan from the Northern Mariana Islands, one of the measure\u2019s co-sponsors.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Vicky Benavente and Gregorio Kilili Sablan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sablan said the biggest challenges to getting more federal data collection in the commonwealth are lack of funding and lack of interest in U.S. territories. The proposed bill would include estimating how much additional data collection would cost.<\/p>\n

Neil Weare,\u00a0executive director of Equally American, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights for residents of U.S. territories, said it may be a hard and expensive undertaking, but it\u2019s one that residents of remote U.S. states benefit from already.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs it harder to collect data in the Aleutian islands in Alaska than it is in Rota?\u201d he asked, referring to an island in the Northern Marianas. \u201cI don\u2019t think so.\u201d<\/p>\n

Less Data, Less Frequently<\/strong><\/p>\n

Robert Underwood, a former U.S. congressman from Guam who now serves on President Joe Biden\u2019s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, thinks the bill is a good first step but the process could be accomplished faster with a directive from the Office of Management and Budget or a presidential executive order.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it is a great idea, but the timeline is a little long,\u201d Underwood said. He noted territories like Guam that conduct their own local surveys may ask for more detail than federal surveys but said inclusion in the federal data collection would lighten the burden on local agencies.<\/p>\n

Weare said Puerto Rico\u2019s American Community Survey stems from an executive order under former President George H.W. Bush.<\/p>\n

Esther Kiaaina previously worked with Underwood in Congress to push for the Office of Management and Budget\u2019s directive to disaggregate data about Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders. The former Interior Department official and current Honolulu City Council member\u00a0said ensuring dedicated funding to federal agencies to collect the data would be key.<\/p>\n

Otherwise, federal agencies might seek to pull funding from the Insular Affairs division to fulfill requirements related to territories, which would result in less money for the island communities themselves, she said.<\/p>\n

But while funding may still be an open question, there\u2019s no question the data gaps that the bill would address are longstanding. For one thing, all the island territories except Puerto Rico are excluded from the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey miss out on incredibly important, timely information about demographics, the economy, housing, all of these things are incredibly important to policy decision-making,\u201d said Jae June Lee, policy and data analyst at the Georgetown Center on Poverty\u2019s Inequality, Economic Security and Opportunity Initiative.<\/p>\n

That also means that territories aren\u2019t included when national population estimates are routinely calculated, implying that they don\u2019t reflect who we are as a country, Lee said.<\/p>\n

All U.S territories are included in the decennial Census.\u00a0On Thursday, the Census released its 2020 demographic profiles for American Samoa, the Northern Marianas, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.<\/p>\n

But even then the territories aren\u2019t on the same footing as states, said Lee, who notes that demographic profiles for these smaller island communities are issued later in the year compared with the national census data. He said data from those four U.S. territories also aren\u2019t subject to the same data integrity analyses as data from states, making it tough to tell whether the communities are undercounted or overcounted.<\/p>\n

To Lee, this is a racial justice issue. The vast majority of people living in U.S. territories are people of color, including in Pacific territories. According to the census data issued Thursday, 46% of people living on Guam are Pacific Islanders, most Indigenous Chamorros, and 35% identify as Asian.<\/p>\n

In the Northern Marianas, more than 43% of the population are Pacific Islanders\u2014including a quarter Chamorros\u2014and 46% are Asian. In American Samoa, over 88% are Pacific Islanders. Those statistics don\u2019t include people who identify as mixed race.<\/p>\n

The communities also have high rates of low-income families. The family poverty rate on Guam was 16.8% in 2019, rising to nearly 24% for families with children under the age of 18. In the Northern Mariana Islands that same year, the poverty rate was 33% for families, exceeding 42% for families with children.<\/p>\n

In American Samoa, fully half of families were under the poverty line in 2019, including 57% of families with children under the age of 18. More data could help policymakers justify requests for more resources for their communities.<\/p>\n

Weare thinks the lack of parity in data collection reflects broader systemic discrimination and disregard for the territories.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want to count when it comes to federal policy, you need to count when it comes to federal data collection,\u201d Weare said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: Republished with permission. Originally published on https:\/\/www.civilbeat.org\/2022\/10\/us-territory-reps-hope-congress-will-remedy-longstanding-data-gaps\/ Like many other parts of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":378505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[320],"class_list":["post-378502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}