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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Will English Survive the Immigrant Flood? |
| 2006-08-21 |
| Forty-Two Percent of Californians Don't Speak English at Home When the Census Bureau released its American Community Survey analyzing demographic trends among U.S. households last week, the Washington Post and the New York Times, the flagship newspapers of the Eastern liberal establishment, celebrated the news with front-page stories. The Census Bureau’s data confirmed that the U.S. continues to be inundated by a flood of immigrants both legal and illegal (a distinction the bureau does not even make). The top-of-the-page headline in the Post said: “Area Immigrants Top 1 Million.” The Times’ front-page headline read: “New Data Shows Immigrants’ Growth and Reach.” “Last year, one in five people in metropolitan Washington were immigrants, compared with one in six in 2000,” said the Post. The Washington, D.C., area, the Post noted, is now one of eight U.S. metropolitan areas—with New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston and Dallas—that have at least 1 million immigrants. “[T]he rise in the immigrant household population since 2000 seems to indicate that the blazing pace of immigration seen throughout the 1990s has continued into the first half of this decade,” the New York Times reported. Out in the Midwest, the Chicago Tribune focused attention on a different aspect of the Census Bureau’s survey: English is declining as the common language of the United States. Spanish is on the rise. The Tribune’s front-page story, which reported that 30% of Chicago-area residents do not speak English at home, was headlined: “In more area homes, it’s Español.” “For the Barraza family, life is conducted mostly in Spanish,” the Tribune reported. “The Elgin (Ill.) couple works together, cleaning newly built homes in the Aurora area, where they take orders from a Spanish-speaking supervisor. When they get home, they speak with their two school-age sons in Spanish. It is a situation that is increasingly common, as Spanish becomes the primary language spoken in a growing number of homes across the metropolitan area, according to new census data … “With an influx of Spanish-language radio stations, cable channels and newspapers,” the Tribune reported, “marketers see a huge opportunity to tap into the fastest-growing segment of the population and one that accounts for virtually all of the area’s population gains.” Deep in its own story on the Census survey, the Post reported that in Prince William County in suburban Virginia, enrollment in the local public school program for students who do not speak English has increased 274% in five years. Eighty percent of the students enrolled in the program speak Spanish. Additional survey data published on the Census Bureau’s website reveal that the Chicago area and Prince William County are hardly alone in having large and growing populations of non-English-speaking—and especially Spanish speaking—residents. In California, the nation’s largest state, 42.3% of the people do not speak English at home. More than 28% speak Spanish instead. One in five Californians told the Census Bureau they speak English “less than very well.” Within California, the foreign-language speakers tend to be concentrated in certain communities. In the City of Los Angeles, 60.8% of the people do not speak English at home. More than 44% speak Spanish instead. And 31.3% say they speak English “less than very well.” In the Orange County city of Santa Ana, 84.7% do not speak English at home. More than 75% speak Spanish instead, and 50.8% say they speak English “less than very well.” On the other side of the continent, in Miami, Fla, 78.9% do not speak English at home, 69.8% speak Spanish instead, and 46.7% say they speak English “less than very well.” Up North in Passaic, N.J., 72.7% of the people do not speak English at home, 62.9% speak Spanish instead, and 45.4% say they speak English “less than very well.” America is headed toward a cultural catastrophe. Chronic non-enforcement of our immigration laws together with a multicultural ideology that seeks to make it easier for immigrants—and their children and grandchildren—to retain their native cultures, could strip this nation of a unifying, common language. There is nothing, of course, wrong with the Spanish language, or with immigrants’ coming to the United States from Spanish-speaking regions of the world. But there is something profoundly wrong with a political elite that has been so lax in enforcing our borders that it may have established within the U.S. foreign-language enclaves large enough and concentrated enough to successfully resist assimilation. The Census Bureau’s new American Community Survey demonstrates that if the melting pot is not broken beyond repair, it is severely cracked and bubbling over. In the coming election cycles, enforcing U.S. borders and immigration laws and promoting public policies that resist the primacy of multiculturalism should be at the center of the national debate. Percent of People Five Years and Over Who Speak a Language Other Than English at Home 1. California: 42.3% 2. New Mexico: 36.1% 3. Texas: 33.6% 4. New York: 28.2% 5. Arizona: 27.4% 5. New Jersey: 27.4% 7. Nevada: 26.2% 8. Florida: 25.4% 9. Hawaii: 24% 10. Illinois: 21.5% |
| Posted by:mcsegeek1 |
| #12 ¿Qué? |
| Posted by: DMFD 2006-08-21 23:16 |
| #11 "push 1 for English...push 2 to be disconnected" |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-08-21 21:20 |
| #10 NS-I like what you said about ballots. But I would extend it beyond ballots to English-only governmental documents, utility bills and answering services on the principle of no preferential treatment: no favoritism for Spanish language speakers over those who speak Chinese, Polish or Ewe. We can't (and shouldn't have to) provide equal bilingual services for all-what a waste of money and energy that would be. There are many different groups here-why cater to one? I have lived in a country where there is more than one official language. While people get valuable multilingual skills, internal communication can be inefficient, exhausting, and more expensive. Most importantly, feelings of rivalry emerge. A common language encourages communities to bind together. Push for language study in school-we still need to be able to understand the rest of the world, but squelch the government services angle. |
| Posted by: Jules in the Hinterlands 2006-08-21 20:51 |
| #9 If you can't read and understand the Declaration and Constitution in its original language, you should not be permitted to vote. That would rule out about a third of all high school graduates voting. They can't understand a simple parking ticket, how are they going to understand the Constitution? |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2006-08-21 20:37 |
| #8 I and my two sons (18 and 17) seem to get by OK with a complicated system of grunts, pointing and body language. |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-08-21 19:40 |
| #7 Now what does stick in my craw is bi, tri, you name it-lingual ballots... If you can't speak English well enough to vote, you can't speak it well enough to understand the debate. If you can't read and understand the Declaration and Constitution in its original language, you should not be permitted to vote. |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2006-08-21 18:49 |
| #6 I'd be willing to bet that when my parents were kids in the 1930s, 42% of Youngstown, Ohio didn't speak English at home. I know there was a Hungarian parish that said a Mass each week in Magyar well into the 1970s. Heck, there's a weekly Vietnamese language service at a protestant church just up the street from where I sit typing right now. |
| Posted by: Mike 2006-08-21 14:52 |
| #5 I'll worry when Mr Kim and Mr Wu and Mr Muhammed and Mr Singh start teaching their kids Spanish in order to get by. I have inlaws whose command of English is pretty weak. But until Mr Sanchez speaks Yiddish, hes going to have to use English to communicate with them. At least around here adult english classes tend to be pretty heavily subscribed, from what i understand. |
| Posted by: liberalhawk 2006-08-21 14:32 |
| #4 The Hispanics in NM didn't move there. By and large, they were there from the time of the acquisition. Old buggers they must be. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2006-08-21 14:08 |
| #3 What is called New Mexico today was the most populated of the areas acquired in the Mexican-American War. The % shown approximately matches the number in population of the Hispanic community to the whole these days. The Hispanics in NM didn't move there. By and large, they were there from the time of the acquisition. The NM state Constitution, not some federal judge, established both English and Spanish as official languages. So in this case, its a so what. |
| Posted by: Phunter Ulalet1168 2006-08-21 13:31 |
| #2 Pish. English will survive quite well. I am a lot more concerned about what kids are taught to speak at school than what they speak at home. Bilingual education must be ended everywhere. It was shown in California that there was an increase in test scores when the kids went to English only instruction. And disgruntled Hispanic parents led the fight. They knew their kids couldn't fit in a succeed economically if they couldn't speak English. Immigrants need to be assimilated by our public institutions. But let them keep their family culture as long as they want. If they're willing to take the economic consequences like the Amish, fine. If they want to be typical Americans that's fine too. All that listing shows is which states get lots of immigrants and where defence should go to get bi-lingual recruits. Now what does stick in my craw is bi, tri, you name it-lingual ballots... If you can't speak English well enough to vote, you can't speak it well enough to understand the debate. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-08-21 13:17 |
| #1 I saw this and I got the schedule for CCD classes for my church and I noticed something very interesting. My church has services in Spanish and English but they only offer Spanish CCD classes for grades 1, 2 & 3. Kind of tells me that parents that speak Spanish at home arenÂ’t forcing their children to speak only Spanish and by age ?8? most kids are proficient enough to have classes in English only. |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2006-08-21 12:47 |