I bet this is one of the more unpopular positions I have, and I doubt any immigration bill can pass without a requirement that new Americans learn English, but I promise you that this is a pointless idea.
Learning English is incredibly useful for navigating life in the United States so you’re basically going to see almost every new immigrant do it no matter what. People already have all the incentives they need to learn the language of power in this country. We don’t need to require them to do it.
The people who live here and don’t know English very well tend to be old people, and it’s not clear to me what is to be gained from making grandmas and grandpas learn a new language so far along in life.
The animating idea behind the politics of this issue seems to be that white supremacy over American culture needs to be chiseled into the law, which is obviously a disgusting premise, but it’s amazing how much overt racism you can get away with when you frame it as a debate over “language.”
I have to disagree. You’ve obviously never been to Miami where if you don’t speak Spanish you can’t get a job in some places. English is the common bond of the country, the way you go from immigrant to citizen by assimilating into the culture. My great-grandparents, grandparents and parents didn’t speak (much) English in the home but they certainly did when at work, shopping or anything else that brought them in contact with the outside world. They had and celebrated their culture while adapting to ours and that is not a white, brown, black or green imperative it is an American one.
Some places have more Spanish speakers so it’s useful to know Spanish too. If working in Miami requires you to know Spanish, then it makes sense they don’t hire people who don’t speak it, just as it makes sense for employers not to hire people who don’t speak English in cities where people do business in English. I doubt you’d support Miami mandating that everyone learn Spanish, even people’s English-speaking grandparents, just because lots of people know and use the language. But plenty of people still learn it because it’s helpful for meeting people, traversing the labor market, etc. There’s no need to force anybody to learn English. There are plenty of incentives for them to do it since it’s so useful.
Spanish in NOT the language of the country. I pretty sure I have a few decades on you and when I grew up it was still ethnic neighborhoods. Mine was German, 2 blocks away it was Ukrainian and across the tracks were the Poles. When the butcher (for example) talked to the regulars he used whatever language of the neighborhood was. When he talked to someone new they used English. You don’t see that in Miami in a lot of cases. I’m not picking on Miami there are Texas towns that are the same too. English makes you a member of the citizenry with a common bond. Spanish et al does not.
English isn’t the official language of the country either. We don’t have an official language. The language is whatever people happen to be using. Maybe a couple centuries from now the dominant language will be Spanish. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no use being prescriptive about this stuff. People have no trouble communicating with the people they have to talk to on a day-to-day basis. If it’s useful for them to learn English, they’ll probably do it, and if not, no big deal. The debate over English as the Official Language has nothing to do with convenience and usefulness. It’s about fear of declining white influence over American culture, and people want to feel like they can control that by enshrining white dominance in the law. It’s really sad.
Every group that came here willingly or otherwise learned English in order to be citizens. I have first hand experience with the Hmong and some of their proudest moments were when they learned enough English to be citizens. I can’t speak for each and every one of them of course but of the community I knew it was true. Maybe they were just ensuring the white dominance of the people that abandoned them at the end of the war.
You are trying to politicize what is a societal norm for people of the same tribe, in this case Americans, to band together.
I think you’re missing my point. It’s good to learn English! People should do it. But they should do it because it’ll be useful to them, not because we force them to do it by law. I don’t see any evidence that people lack adequate incentives to learn English. The demand for English education in developing countries is enormous. People are learning it of their own volition because they understand how useful it is to know, and not just as aspiring US citizens but as citizens of other countries as well. It’s the language of power throughout the world.
What people here seem to be bothered by is people speaking Spanish to other Spanish speakers in public places. The people who are most exercised about this issue don’t really have Spanish speakers’ best interests in mind. They just want to stop hearing Spanish spoken in public.
I’d be happy not to hear people speaking on their damn phones no matter what the language.
Completely agree
That is why this country is soooo fragmented. Language is the glue that binds a country together. Without a common language you have chaos. The current policy of having documents printed in two languages, english and spanish, lays waste to your argument that only the old don’t understand english. The government doesn’t believe this or it wouldn’t be spending millions of our tax dollars to convert english documents to spanish. May be we should have documents written in ebonics, also. Oh, I forgot, you have to be able to read to understand documents, no matter what language its written in. So now we have the specter of education being introduced into the mix. I want to know why you think that requiring aliens of any age to understand english to aquire citizenship is bad. If you don’t want to embrace the customs and culture of our country and want to create a little Mexican enclave here and never leave, go home to Mexico or wherever you came from.
Huh? Lots of the people who use government services (most?) are old. How does that “lay waste” to my argument? Who cares if people speak different languages in the country. It’s not a monoculture