Asian Indian appears as one of the ethnic or racial categories that can be ticked off on the form along with Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Pakistanis do not have a category to tick off on the form, but the form suggests that they can write in their ethnicity under “Other Asian.” The provision for Sikhs to write in their identity was publicized in January. Rachel Marks, the chief of the bureau’s racial statistics branch, explained to Newsday how they got around the ban on religion questions by classifying Sikhism as an “ethno-religious” category rather than a religion. She told the newspaper that while the census is prohibited by law from soliciting information on religion, Sikhs fall into the ethno-religious category because their religion is “intertwined to become more of a cultural identity”. The Census Bureau has been working with the Sikh community during the past decade, she told Newsday and “they told us they really needed this, to be counted separately”.

The effort to count Sikhs meshes in with the move to count various ethnic groups that had been swept under the general categories of White, Black or “Other Asian.” In a statement to the newspaper, Marks and Census Bureau’s Race and Ethnic Research Director Nicholas Jones, said the Census Bureau is “committed to producing data for detailed race and ethnic groups, including distinct detailed groups like the Sikh, Irish, Jamaican and hundreds of other populations”. Marks told Newsday that there was a precedent for counting “ethno-religious groups” and cited the Amish, a reclusive Christian sect that eschews most modern technologies.