LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas’ tally of Pacific Islanders more than tripled over the past decade, and the number of children in that category more than quadrupled, the latest census numbers show.
Although they make up only about two-tenths of a percent of the state’s 2.9 million residents, those who identify themselves as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders increased from 1,494 in 2000 to 5,509 in 2010 — an increase of 268.7 percent, census figures show.
The number of children of Pacific Islander descent grew 317.5 percent, an increase of 1,778. There were only 560 Pacific Islanders younger than 18 in 2000. In 2010, there were 2,338.
Census officials say the jump in numbers doesn’t necessarily indicate a rapid influx of islanders. More likely, they say, is that more of Arkansas’ Marshall Islands natives are filling out census forms.
Marshallese accounted for 75 percent of the Arkansas residents who checked “Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander” on their census forms.
“This was the first time they could specify their race group,” said Phyllis Poche, director of the Census State Data Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
The numbers matter because Arkansas officials hope that the state can qualify for some of the aid that is distributed to Hawaii and three U.S. territories that host migrant populations from the Republic of the Marshall Islands and two other Pacific island nations that have special diplomatic relationships with the United States.
Through a Compact of Free Association, citizens from each of the three Pacific island countries are allowed to live and work in the United States without visas as “non-immigrant migrants.”
The agreements with the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia include $600 million in “compact-impact” aid to host U.S. governments to defray the costs of providing education, health and social services to the migrants — $30 million in each of the 20 years covered by the agreements.
Arkansas isn’t included in the aid, and state officials and health providers in the Springdale area believe that having a complete census count will bolster arguments to include the state in the compact funding.
There were 4,121 Marshallese in the state in 2010, and more than 3,600 of them were in Springdale, the census figures show.
“We anxiously awaited the census numbers to come out so we can track it with what we see here, to see what the census numbers show about the Marshallese, because they really haven’t shown a lot in the past,” said Kathy Grisham, the executive director of the Springdale-based Community Clinic.
The clinic is part of a system of five medical and dental clinics in Washington and Benton counties that secures federal grant money to reach the uninsured, isolated or medically vulnerable and offer services on an income-based, sliding-fee scale.
In the past, estimates of the number of Marshallese in the Springdale area ranged wildly — from roughly 2,500 to 12,000, Grisham said. The imprecision made it difficult to secure adequate grants through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Resources and Services Administration, she said.
To get a better count, the Census Bureau posted a special liaison in Northwest Arkansas to focus on getting an accurate count of the Marshallese and ran ad campaigns stressing the importance of filling out the census forms.
“We’ve had a large concentration in the state for a number of years, but we’ve never been able to pinpoint how many there were,” Poche said.
But the census figures seem to square with other available numbers.
In 2010, Community Clinic Springdale Medical saw 1,250 Marshallese patients out of its 23,000 clients, and Grisham expects that number to hit 1,500 by the end of this year.
“It’s mainly children that we’re dealing with,” Grisham said.
The median age of islanders in 2010 was 19.2, down from 25.2 in 2000.
Officials at the Springdale School District say the census demographics support something they’ve been seeing in the number of Marshallese under age 18.
A couple of years ago, the district had about 1,000 Marshallese children, said spokesman Rick Schaeffer.
“Last year, we had a little over 1,600,” he said. “That’s just Marshallese.”
HEALTH CHALLENGES
Dr. Joe Bates, deputy state health officer with the Arkansas Department of Health, said through a spokesman that agency officials “certainly hope the new census figures will help Congress make the decisions that could lead to better funding.”
“The Marshallese population presents a very challenging set of medical problems and health-care issues for us to deal with,” Bates said in a statement through department spokesman Ed Barham.
Bates was among state officials who met with a team from the U.S. Government Accountability Office that visited Arkansas in March to assess the impact of Pacific Islanders on public and private health care. The agency is expected to issue a report in September.
In May, Springdale-area advocates who formed a “Gaps in Services” task force on behalf of the Marshallese learned that Arkansas’ U.S. senators were among nine federal lawmakers who had asked Cabinet-level officials to consider screening measures to help reduce the migration of the Pacific Islanders to the United States.
Sens. John Boozman, RArk., and Mark Pryor, D-Ark., were among a bipartisan group that wrote Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of the Interior Kenneth Salazar on May 12 asking them to adopt the screening, as well as increase health-care funding to the islands.
The lawmakers described the proposed screening as being geared toward “reducing the number of migrants who are likely to become a public charge.”
They contended that the intent of the U.S. policy was to allow the citizens of the compact nations to enter the U.S. to live, work and study, but that the migrants are increasingly coming to the U.S. to access health care and social services that aren’t available on the islands. That is making the current U.S. policy “unsustainable,” they wrote.
Lawmakers’ suggestions in the May 12 letter included diverting some of the compactimpact grants from the host states to the island nations, so the citizens would have less incentive to come to the United States. One example, they suggested, was establishing dialysis treatment centers in the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia.
They asked the Cabinet officials to report to Congress on the issue by Oct. 1.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 08/29/2011