An analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau has revealed that a significant portion of Brazilians in the United States identify as Hispanic or Latino.
The revelation surfaced after a discrepancy in the bureau's yearly 2020 American Community Survey, which Pew Research described as a "coding error," revealed issues in how the census processes data.
Around 416,000 Brazilians identified as Hispanic or Latino in the Census Bureau's 2020 survey. That's about two-thirds of Brazilians in the United States.
In 2019 just 14,000 Brazilians were counted as identifying as Hispanic, with 16,000 in 2021.
The federal government's official definition of Hispanic, last updated in 1997, doesn't include Brazilians, Pew said.
According to Pew Research, in the 2020 census over 20 million Hispanic people said they identified "with more than one race."
The term Hispanic, according to the official government definition, are those of "Spanish culture origin," including Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, those from South or Central America and some other origins.
Pew says that people who reported their identityas Brazilian in Census Bureau surveys would be later "recategorized" or "back coded," in most cases. They would then be classified as not Latino or Hispanic.
Multiple other groups were affected by the Census Bureau's data processing error.
Census data revealed how multiple other groups showed they identified in larger numbers as Hispanic in 2020, compared to other years.
In one example, the census data showed that people who answered the survey and were of Filipino origin, but self-identified as Hispanic or Latino numbered 30,000 more in 2020 compared to 2021.
Those who were from "non-Hispanic countries" like Guyana, the Virgin Islands and Jamaica, but self-identified as Hispanic, included 28,000 more people in 2020 than in 2021. For Belize, there were 12,000 more in 2020 compared to 2021.
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