By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau

LITTLE ROCK — The Arkansas chapter of a national Hispanic organization does not support another Hispanic group’s call for illegal immigrants to boycott the 2010 U.S. Census, officials said Tuesday.

The National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders is urging undocumented immigrants to refuse to participate in the census unless Congress and the Obama administration first pass immigration reform, including a path to legalization for the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.

“Our church leaders have witnessed misuse of otherwise benign Census population data by state and local public officials in their efforts to pass and enact laws that assist in the perpetration of civil rights violations and abuses against undocumented workers and families,” the group’s chairman, the Rev. Miguel Rivera, said in a news release.

A census boycott could affect federal funding for states and apportionment of U.S. House seats, among other things.

Arkansas has the fastest-growing Hispanic population in the nation. Ana Hart of Springdale, newly elected state director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Carlos Cervantes of Little Rock, LULAC’s past state director, said Tuesday that the state chapter’s policy on the census is the same as the national organization’s — that all immigrants, regardless of status, should be counted.

“That would give us a close number of how many really are in the United States, instead of guessing,” Cervantes said.

An accurate counting would help in determining how much money immigrants put into government coffers in the form of taxes and would be useful in the push for legal reform, according to Cervantes.

“It all kind of goes toward immigration reform,” he said.

Census officials have said they hope to count all immigrants in the next census and will not ask about immigration status.

Rivera said Congress’ failure to pass immigration reform has forced undocumented immigrants into the shadows.

“We will not urge the most vulnerable members of our congregations to come out of the shadows and voluntarily report their personal data to the Census Bureau” unless reform comes first, he said.

Cervantes said getting undocumented immigrants to participate in the census would be difficult even without a boycott.

“They might answer the bell, they might not,” he said. “More likely they won’t, out of fear. And if they do, instead of saying there’s two adults and four children, they might say one adult and one child or something, maybe not even that.

“To me, it’s going to be tricky just to get the right count even then.”