DALLAS—The U.S. Census Bureau is scouring Texas for an oddly elusive worker: the Spanish-speaking American who qualifies for the job. Getty Images U.S. Census recruiting assistant Terrie Valdez-Rubio at a job fair last month in Ontario, Calif. Texas is home to more Hispanics than any other state except California, and the pool of job seekers should be brimming due to the highest unemployment rate in years. Yet the agency can't seem to come up with enough workers. "It's hard to hire so many people," said Efren Salinas, a Census spokesman based in the heavily Hispanic southern part of the state. In Texas, the Census is still looking for 25,000 applicants from so-called hard-to-count communities—population groups that have low participation rates in the Census due to language or cultural barriers and educational gaps, among other factors. In cities near the Mexico border such as McAllen and La Feria, hundreds of positions remain unfilled, Mr. Salinas said. The Census expects to employ more than 100,000 workers throughout Texas at the peak of operations this year, in the late spring and early summer.[Read more...]