EDITORIAL: A community on the move (09/01/02)

EDITORIAL

A community on the move

Since 1980, when the U.S. Census first asked residents of the United States about their ancestry, as well as about the language spoken at home other than English, Ukrainian Americans have been able to get a glimpse of ethnic identification and assimilation processes, as well as immigration.

A stalwart contributor to The Ukrainian Weekly, demographer Oleh Wolowyna, who has been analyzing each successive census's results, explained to readers that the 1980 questionnaire asked respondents to identify with an ancestry no matter how many generations removed they were from that ancestry or their homeland. Furthermore, the 1980 Census recognized that there is a high degree of intermarriage in this country and, therefore, allowed respondents to list more than one ancestry. As a result, we learned that there are 730,056 persons who named Ukrainian as their ancestry - 52.2 percent of them declared Ukrainian as their single ancestry, while 47.8 percent listed Ukrainian in addition to another ancestry. Those results came closer to identifying the true number of Ukrainians in this country than did the 1970 Census, which allowed researchers to determine only that 250,000 respondents nationwide considered Ukrainian as their "mother tongue" (i.e., the language spoken at home).

Writing in 1983 about the results of the 1980 Census, Dr. Wolowyna was truly excited about the prospects that the availability of this data provided. Language retention, intermarriage, assimilation, ethnic identification and community cohesiveness, he explained, were just some of the topics that could be elucidated by researching census date. And these, he underscored, should be crucial for our community organizations and institutions as they plan ahead and determine how best to serve the Ukrainian American community. On the basis of the 1980 figures, Dr. Wolowyna could state, for example, that language retention among Ukrainians is quite low - only 17 percent for all those who consider themselves at least partly Ukrainian. However, considering the immigration history of Ukrainians, when compared with Eastern European groups with similar experiences, Ukrainians have the highest level of language retention, he observed.

The 1990 Census showed a 1.5 percent increase in the number of Ukrainians in the United States to a total of 740,803. Dr. Wolowyna accounted for the increase by citing some immigration of Ukrainians to this country and an increase in ethnic awareness due to transformations then occurring in the Soviet Union.

Ten years later, the 2000 U.S. Census - coming after the declaration of Ukraine's independence and the disintegration of the Soviet Union - has revealed an extraordinary growth in the number of Ukrainians. Today there are 893,055 of us in the United States - a growth of 20.6 percent. In terms of the number of people, there are 152,252 more Ukrainians here than there were a decade earlier. And, there is fascinating information about where these Ukrainians live. For example, three states, New York, California and Washington, saw increases in their population that amount to five digits - from over 19,000 to over 27,000. And there are other surprises, too.

Looking at the Census figures from 1970 through 2000, Dr. Wolowyna has noted a significant trend: some of the states with the largest concentrations of Ukrainians tended to lose Ukrainians, e.g., Pennsylvania, while many of the states with relatively large increases of Ukrainians between 1990 and 2000 are states that until recently had very few Ukrainians, indicating a continuing geographic dispersion of Ukrainians in the U.S. (We direct our readers' attention to Dr. Wolowyna's article on page 9 of this issue.) Next year, our expert notes, there will be even more detailed information available about who all these Ukrainians are, and the data can be analyzed on the country, state and local levels.

Indeed, we are a dynamic community and a community on the move. All of the data gathered by the U.S. Census could be quite useful for the future of the Ukrainian American community. It would behoove our community leaders, organizations and institutions to take note of where their members - and potential members - live today, and to adopt appropriate programs to establish and maintain contact with them. All of us could only benefit from such study, planning and foresight.

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