There is a new question on the Census that is kind of problematic.
On the short form it is a blank box after your “Race” entry where you put your “Ancestry” in, with examples being something like “French,English,Irish”, ie “comma delimited” and implied to be at the level of country name.
On the long form they give you a menu of things to choose, which includes country names but also regions like Scandanavia and….American.
I’m a data scientist by profession, have been doing analytics for 30 years and I really can’t see any value to this question from a Census perspective. I am actually something like this:
¼ Danish, 3/16 Norwegian, 3/16 Swedish, 1/8 Spanish, 1/16 Welsh, 1/16 English and 1/16 American back to Revolutionary days. The last immigrant in my personal ancestors was 3 generations ago.
So basically I’m working on the assumption that either this is a null question or it is a “nothing good” question. My recommendation?
Choose “American”
Choose it unless your country or region of origin is important enough to you that you really want them to know (I can see an immigrant wanting to share that information, or somebody proud of their heritage and wanting it to be counted, for example).
Anybody born a citizen though is American by ancestry in my book and anybody who’s getting a Census form in America is American by ancestry too in my book if they want to be, even if they were born somewhere else.
It’s safer that way, and if enough go that route they’ll stop trying to do that in 10 years, because the information won’t be of any use.
If you have a contrary opinion, please share in comments.