Census moves to locating homes

The 2020 Census has already moved to the second phase of its operations in the CNMI: the address listing phase, which involves mapping the many homes in the CNMI.

Lorenza Aldan, the 2020 Census’ assistant manager of field operations, said that, as of today, their enumerators are going around and compiling a list of all the places in the CNMI where people may be living or staying, so that they can return there next month to conduct interviews.

Aldan hopes to end the second phase by the end of February so that they could move on to start counting the population.

According to U.S Census Bureau representative and adviser to the CNMI Colleen Joyce, they will ship the information back to the Census Bureau’s processing center in Indiana. It will then get scanned, digitized, and put together so that the CNMI Census office can start creating the cumulative statistics.

According to Joyce, if a enumerator comes a vacant lot, it will get listed and will get checked on during the third phase in case someone moved in after they checked the first time.

“At this stage that we’re currently in, if there are any questions that the enumerators have, we kindly ask that the people that are living in that area be open and welcoming to those conversations,” said Aldan.

Every enumerator that is going out into the field will have two badges so that they can be easily identified and they also have a Census car decal with them to show that they are Census employees.

During the interview phase of the census, residents will be asked questions regarding housing, people who are currently living with you, and other private information. Aldan assured that all information will be kept confidential and nothing gets published or shared with the government, public, or private sectors. Violators will be fined up to $250,000 and could face jail time.

“All the personal identifiable information gets coated [and] they’re not privy to that information,” said Aldan.

“They replace the name with a number, then use it to be able to aggregate it with your neighbors to create a statistic for the larger community,” added Joyce.

Census won’t be asking questions about citizenship, how you got to the CNMI, social security number, and other personal information.

Aldan advises the public to tie up their dogs as the field workers are going around to collect physical descriptions of each house that they’re assigned to.