FSM Census Project

Survey by Micronesian Seminar.

To All FSM Citizens,

We are asking for your help on a survey of FSM citizens now living in the US mainland, Hawaii and Guam. This survey will be conducted by Fr. Fran Hezel, SJ, former director of Micronesian Seminar, and Mike Levin, who has managed many of the earlier censuses of FSM as well as of migrants in Hawaii and Guam. 

This survey is being conducted to gather accurate information on the FSM people living abroad so that we can provide a fair picture of them, their families, and how they are doing in their new homes. Many of you have read newspaper accounts stressing the problems that our people are encountering or creating–the homelessness, the front-page crimes, and the over-reliance on US federal or state assistance. While these news items may be factual, they surely don’t represent the whole truth. 

In the course of the survey, we will be doing lengthy interviews with hundreds of Micronesian households in Guam, Hawaii and the mainland US to gain a reliable picture of how island people are managing their families, educating their children, and interacting with both local communities and their friends and family back in the islands. Once the survey is completed, we will be writing a report on the findings that will be distributed to our leaders in FSM as well as to US officials who are reviewing those parts of the Compact agreement that touch on the rights of FSM citizens to migrate to the US.

Before we randomly select the households to be interviewed in the survey, we need contact information for as many FSM migrants as possible. Ideally, we would like to have the names of all Micronesians in the US, but we know that this is impossible. We’ll settle for a very large number so that we have a deep pool from which to select those who will be interviewed. The survey won’t carry the weight it should if we don’t have thousands of names to select from. (At present, there are an estimated 50,000 FSM citizens living in the US and Guam,)

What can you do to help? We’d ask you to sign in so that we can add your name to the registry of FSM citizens. If you know of others in the US, sign them in also. We’re not asking for confidential information at this point–just names, addresses, phone numbers and/or email addresses. This information will not be shared with anyone other than FSM officials and, of course, the two of us in charge of the survey–Mike Levin and Fr. Fran Hezel.

To add your name to the roll, please complete the Survey on this website.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FSM_Citizens_US-Guam