Johnson | Immigration

The magic words "make them learn English"

The political importance of English requirements in America's immigration reform

By R.L.G. | NEW YORK

PAUL WALDMAN has an excellent post about immigration reform in America, and the crucial role of provisions that undocumented workers be made to learn English on their path to citizenship. Such a provision is mostly about politics, not language, because it's not really necessary. Mr Waldman describes the three-generation pattern that has turned every past wave of no-English groups coming to America (Jews, Italians, Germans) into monoglot Anglophones. There is no reason to expect different from today's Latinos, even given their large numbers and concentration in certain places. The immigrants' kids always learn English, and speak the heritage language at home. The third generation has a smattering of the heritage language, at best. The fourth: as the Italians in Brooklyn say, fuhgeddaboutit.

But putting a learn-English provision in an immigration-reform bill comforts the current generation of American citizens nervous that a path to citenzhip means a path to a bilingual America. They see signs in Spanish (if not in many other languages) in their own towns and wonder if e pluribus unum no longer applies. It does.

If the drafters are sensible, a part of the "learn-English" package will be funding for courses. You can't expect a hard-working adult day labourer to pick up English from the atmosphere (especially when he's likely to work with his fellow immigrants). And as part of this step forward, I hope we don't expect immigrants to avoid using their first languages. The three-generation pattern has already stripped so many Americans of what would be a valuable skill; native fluency in a foreign language. There's no reason to hurry the process by treating a naturalised immigrant as suspicious for keeping his first language alive in his family. The solution to this apparent conundrum is very simple: bilingualism. It's a healthy thing that Americans have historically been too suspicious of. Nebraska banned almost all foreign-language teaching in 1919. Hopefully, America has made progress since then. English is good, but that's not the same thing as English-only.

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