New York: The concerns of The Sikh Coalition, a New York based non-profit Sikh-American advocacy group, about what might lead to a severe undercount of the community in the 2020 census in the United States (US) appear to be well-founded.
The statement has come in the wake of the US Census Bureau (USCB) releasing data, this month, from the 2020 Census – an effort by the US government to formally count everyone in the country, regardless of age or citizenship status, wherever they live every 10 years.
“Unfortunately, with the publication of a new report from the USCB, our concerns about undercounting appear to have been well-founded: Per the 2020 Census data, only 48,321 respondents marked Sikh “alone,” and 70,697 marked Sikh “Alone or in any combination,” said this largest Sikh civil and human rights group in the US in its emailed statement released September 28, 2023.
“We continue to believe, based on our engagement with 350 gurdwaras from coast to coast, that the population meets or exceed this number,” added the statement.
For the last 20 years, the most common and most credible estimate has been that there are more than 500,000 Sikhs in the US.
This undercount matters immensely because the US government uses information from the census to allocate more than $600 billion worth of resources per year to communities across the country. An inaccurate picture of the number of Sikhs in different places could thus lead to poor policy decisions about how best to serve our sangats.
For the first time in the US history, the USCB announced in January of 2020 that they would include “Sikh” as a write-in option to census question #9 (“What is your race?”), and that those who wrote in “Sikh” for this answer would be recorded as a distinct detailed population group under the “Asian” racial category as opposed to the “Asian Indian” category.
At the time, the Sikh Coalition and other community voices had warned that Sikhs were a traditionally hard to count population, and that including “Sikh” as a write-in option and a racial category would both likely lead to a severe undercount.
