By Associated Press
By Colonel Harry Riley
By John W. Wallace
By Michael Graham
By Representative Steve King
By Jim Boulet Jr.
By Jerome R. Corsi
English Should Be Our Official Language
December 1995
By Phyllis Schlafly
An American who emigrates to France does not become a Frenchman, no matter how long he lives there. Likewise for other countries. But people come to America from all over the world and they become Americans.
How do we make Americans out of people who come here from so many other continents and cultures? Surely the best, quickest, most obvious, and most efficient way is to teach them to speak English. Immigrants who come to America want to be Americans and to enter our social, political and economic mainstream. Speaking English is the admission ticket to that
road. Without it, immigrants are forever relegated to menial jobs.
The establishment media expressed shock when some presidential candidates joined the movement to make English our official language, but this issue has been steadily building for years. When Americans get the chance to express themselves, it's clear what they want. Twenty-two states have already made English their official language. In Florida, the official English propostion passed by 84 percent, in California by 73 percent, and in Colorado by 61 percent.
The movement to legislate English as our official language has nothing to do with what language you speak in your home, church, or club, or what foreign languages you may care to learn. It has to do only with what language is promoted and paid for by the government.
Few Americans realize that current federal law requires ballots to be printed in non-English languages if only five percent of the population in a voting jurisdiction, or ten thousand people, speak a language other than English. 375 voting districts in 21 states are now required by the federal government to provide voting ballots and election materials in foreign
languages.
In San Francisco, voting materials are printed in three languages. In Los Angeles, ballots printed in Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Korean cost the taxpayers $900,000 in last year's mayoral election. Alameda County, California officials say they spend almost $100 a ballot to provide foreign language voting materials.
Why are we doing this? Our laws require that naturalized citizens must "demonstrate an understanding of the English language, including the ability to read, write, and speak words in ordinary usage in the English language." Since only citizens can vote, there is no reasonable excuse for non-English ballots.
In a number of reported cases, poor translations have made it impossible for someone using the non-English ballot to cast an informed vote. The New York Times reported one 1993 case where a Chinese ballot printed the character for "no" as a translation of "yes."
The Bureaucratic Bilingual Boondoggle
An $8 billion bureaucratic boondoggle called "bilingual education" keeps more than two million immigrant children segregated from English-speaking teachers and children, and thereby consigns them to a foreign-language ghetto where they are taught all subjects in their native tongue. It's a sort of language apartheid. It is nurturing a permanent, non-English-
speaking subculture within America, and that does not bode well for our future.
The term "bilingual education" is a complete misnomer because there is no requirement that children in bilingual programs ever become fluent in English. It promotes unilingual education in the immigrant's native tongue, rather than bilingual language skills.
Since 1974, federal regulations have required public school instructors to be proficient in the foreign language they teach, but no regulations require that they speak English fluently. Federal regulations also decree that a school can lose its funding if it fails to "instruct," "maintain," and "develop" in the student's native tongue, but there is no corresponding penalty for failing to teach English.
The result is that students can and do graduate from public high schools without ever learning English. This system has built a powerful lobby of non-English-speaking school personnel trying to maintain their jobs and funding by keeping children in foreign language classes year after year. According to Linda Chavez, a former director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and now president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, the bilingual education lobby has "a far-reaching political agenda to promote Spanish among Hispanic children -- regardless of whether they speak English or not, regardless of their parents' wishes and even without their knowledge."
Indeed, that is what happens. The bureaucrats try to put all children with Hispanic-sounding names in bilingual education programs even though they may be fully English-speaking and come from English-speaking homes.
Contrary to what some have argued, we can't blame the Supreme Court for the bilingualeducation travesty. The 1974 Lau v. Nichols decision simply left it up to the schools to devise a remedy to deal with non-English-speaking students. It was U.S. Department of Education bureaucrats who created the monster called bilingual education. By the late 1970s,
the federal civil rights office was threatening a cutoff of federal funds to public schools that did not offer bilingual education to Hispanic and other language-minority students.
In California, a 1993 report by the Little Hoover Commission called bilingual education "divisive and wasteful." Yet, California's public school system now mandates instruction in 42 different languages. New York City students are taught in 82 languages, including Kpelle, Nyanja, Twi, Gurma, Ewe, Cham, and others most Americans have never heard of.
What's the Alternative to Bilingual Ed?
Non-English-speaking immigrants didn't start coming to the United States in 1974. All those millions of earlier immigrants learned English by what is called the immersion method; that is, the adults put their children in public schools where only English was spoken, the children learned English rapidly, and they went home and taught English to their parents. This system worked just fine until federal busybodies, with more money than they knew how to spend, decided to experiment on vulnerable immigrant children whose parents didn't know how to fight the system.
Bilingual programs were forced into the schools by federal bureaucrats without any research whatsoever to demonstrate their effectiveness. Twenty years after they started, there's still no proof that these programs are successful in bringing immigrant children into the English-speaking mainstream of our nation. Christine Russell, professor of English at Boston University, evaluated 79 bilingual programs and found that none was any better than just immersing children in English. She said, "Ninety-one percent of scientifically valid studies show bilingual education to be no better -- or actually worse -- than doing nothing."
Anyone who studies this subject will quickly discover dozens of parents who are disappointed or angry at the public schools for failing to teach their children English. Congressman Toby Roth tells about a foreman on a south Texas ranch, Ernesto Ortiz, who said: "My children learn Spanish in school so they can become busboys and waiters. I teach them English at home so they can become doctors and lawyers." Ortiz understands that English is the language of opportunity, and that denying them English means denying them the opportunity to advance in America.
Jorge Amselle, a policy analyst for the Center for Equal Opportunity, says that "Bilingual education today means three to five years in a program where as much as 90 percent of the child's day is spent in the native language, even if it isn't his or her native language." Some parents complain that their children have been taking math in Spanish for as many as seven years.
Amselle relates many horror stories. He says that last year the Houston school district discovered that at least 90 foreign bilingual education teachers had falsified teaching credentials, cheated on competency exams, were working illegally in violation of their visas, or could not speak English. One school principal admitted that she has many bilingual education teachers who speak virtually no English.
Parents complain that the small amount of time dedicated each day to English, usually 10 to 20 percent, is made to include lunch, physical education and music, time that could be spent learning English. Amselle says, "There are many parents who want to remove their children from the bilingual program, but face a lot of intimidation from school administrators."
Polls have found that more that three-fourths of all Americans believe that English should be the official language of government and that anyone who wants to live in this country should learn English. This is especially true of immigrants themselves. A survey of immigrant parents done for the Department of Education found that 78 percent of Mexican Americans and 83 percent of Cuban Americans thought that schools should not teach immigrant or minority children in a foreign language instead of English.
Bilingual Education's Hidden Agenda
The bilingual education lobby now asserts that evidence of effectiveness is not important because the decision of how to teach immigrant children is a "cultural" not a pedagogical issue. Some admit openly that the purpose of bilingual education is not assimilation at all, but is to make foreign language and culture an integral part of American society.
Some advocates see bilingual education as the first step in a radical transformation of the United States into a nation without one common language or fixed borders. Josue Gonzales, director of bilingual education during the Carter Administration and now a professor at Columbia University Teachers College, says that Spanish "should no longer be regarded as a foreign language" but should be considered "a second national language."
Linda Chavez has reported that others in the bilingual lobby have even more extreme views. At the annual conference of the National Association for Bilingual Education in Phoenix in February 1995, several speakers challenged the very idea of U.S. sovereignty and promoted the notion that the Southwest and northern Mexico are really one cultural region, which they dub La Frontera. Eugene Garcia, head of bilingual education at the U.S. Department of Education in the Clinton Administration, told the conferees that "the border for many is nonexistent. For me, for intellectual reasons, that border shall be nonexistent." His rhetoric was greeted by thunderous applause.
At the November 1994 meeting in Austin of the Texas Association for Bilingual Education, both Mexican and American flags were displayed on the stage, and the teachers and school personnel in attendance stood for the singing of the national anthems of both countries.
This movement for ethnic separatism is part of the prevailing liberal dogma called multiculturalism which, in turn, is a major tenet of Political Correctness. Daniel J. Boorstin, former Librarian of Congress, has warned that "The menace to America today is the emphasis on what separates us rather than on what brings us together -- the separations of race . . . of origins, of language. . . . Bilingual teaching tends to restrict opportunities for the very people who need the opportunity to enter the mainstream of American life."
The historian Theodore White points out, "It is distasteful that a nation whose seal bears the inscription E Pluribus Unum (From the Many, One) should be asked to divide itself from one nation into many tribes." A voice from another era, President Theodore Roosevelt, bluntly expressed this same, consistent American doctrine: "The one absolute certain way of bringing this nation to ruin would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities. We have but one flag. We must also have but one language, and that language is English."
In addition to the social destructiveness of cloistering new Americans behind a language wall that prevents them from joining mainstream America, we have to face up to the sheer impossibility of dealing with so many language differences according to any standard that can be called fair or equitable. The demographers tell us that, by the year 2000, our nation will have 40 million Americans who do not speak English.
The large number of foreign languages that are now spoken in America make it downright ridiculous to try to devise laws and regulations that mandate non-English
ballots or public school teaching. There are 115 languages spoken in New York City schools. Election Boards and public schools obviously cannot offer their services in so many scores of languages, so what happens is that some languages are preferred and others are discriminated against.
In California, driver's license tests can be taken in 31 different languages. In New York, 23 different tests are offered, and Michigan offers 20. But think of all the other foreign languages in which driver's license tests are not offered. That's an open invitation for a flood of new lawsuits.
Rhode Island now allows its citizens to take a driver's license in any of six favored
languages. Yet the Rhode Island Historical Heritage Commission reports that the state has at least 26 different language groups. The only equitable way to deal with such diversity is to accept English as the common language.
Winston Churchill once said, "The gift of a common language is a priceless inheritance." This gift is part of our inheritance. We would be fools to kick it away.
We need only look across our northern border to see how ethnic and language separatism can tear apart a great nation and endanger its national identity. On October 30, 1995, by a margin of only 50.6 to 49.4 percent, voters rejected a proposal that French-speaking Quebec secede from English-speaking Canada and become a sovereign nation. The separatists garnered a much larger vote than they did in their referendum in 1980, and the close vote assures that another referendum will be held. Canada's narrow brush with national breakup should underscore the importance of maintaining our own national unity, and the best way to do that is by a common language.
You can't be an American if you don't speak English. Our public schools should be mandated to teach all children in English.
Of course, English should be our official language! The language of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution is fundamental to our national identity. Without it, we will cease to be one nation.
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By Allan Wall
By Frosty Wooldridge
By Phyllis Schlafly
By Marilyn Medina
By Jim Boulet Jr.
Executive Director
English First
By Jim Boulet Jr.
Executive Director
English First
By John W. Lillpop
,
II
Petition
OFFICIAL ENGLISH
, letter to U.S. ENGLISH, Mar. 24, 1987
