ping
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Why is it too much to ask that immigrants (legal and otherwise) learn English? I know it's hard. So are German and Russian, but that didn't stop me from learning them...at least well enough to get along in those countries.
Posted on 07/15/2005 1:00:41 PM PDT by Exton1
GLOBALISM, COLLECTIVISM, AND STUPIDISM
By Phyllis Spivey
"We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will learn presently."
From the novel, 1984, by George Orwell
It’s another of those government edicts that make you think the world has gone mad: Executive Order 13166. In the last months of his presidency, Bill Clinton evidently decided it wasn’t enough to merely force taxpayers to subsidize services to non-citizen, non-English speakers. So he by-passed Congress with a mandate that bestows vast new powers on the federal bureaucracy, trashes states’ rights, individual rights, and what’s left of the free enterprise system. And the Bush Administration is implementing it.
Executive Order 13166 directs all federal agencies to adopt plans for improving access to federally funded programs for persons with limited English proficiency (LEP). In effect, the scheme shifts responsibility away from people with language problems and puts it squarely on any American who offers a public or private service in any way touched by federal funding, including health, education, emergency, transportation, and social services, job training, consumer and environmental protection, law enforcement, courts, public and private contractors, subcontractors and vendors.
It gets worse. According to the pro-U.S.Constitution legal group, Pacific Legal Foundation (www.pacificlegal.org), Bill Lan Lee who at Clinton’s insistence became the government’s chief civil rights lawyer, was a vigorous proponent of multilingual government. Lee took the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin and expanded "national origin" to include "language." Clinton codified Lee’s new definition in EO 13166 and Bush’s Department of Justice has built policy around it.
The legal implications are enormous. Realize that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has reported as many as 500 different languages and dialects spoken by persons residing in the U.S. and you begin to understand the magnitude of the mandate and its ultimate effects on the lives of Americans.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)responded to EO 13166's call to action by issuing rules only a collectivist could love. The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), with the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons and ProEnglish, filed suit in 2004 to block HHS from enforcing its requirements (Colwell v. U.S. Dept. Of HHS). PLF’s description of HHS rules explains why:
HHS forces doctors who have any Medicare or Medicaid patients to provide interpreters and translators – and ensure their competency – for any patient who has limited or no English speaking skills or face possible prosecution for intentional discrimination under the federal Civil Rights Act!
HHS requires the costs of hihring interpreters and translators to be borne entirely by the physician, even at a net loss. The federal government contributes nothing to this huge financial and administrative cost;
Medical providers can protect themselves from legal attack by HHS only by surrendering to the bureaucrats and passing on the costs of this unfunded mandate to their patients, or by simply turning away all Medicare and Medicaid patients.
Dr. Jane Orient, M.C., executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, points out that the rules are so broad and vague physicians will never be sure they are in compliance. "It requires them to divert attention and resources away from patients. Moreover, the edict "gives patients who claim lack of English proficiency the right to sue the doctor any time there is a less than perfect outcome..."
ProEnglish, a nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of English as a common language in America, warns the cost of implementing EO 13166 at all levels of government could easily cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, while taxpayers as consumers would pay again as businesses pass on their compliance costs. In reality, the costs of a globalistic, multilingual society where an all-powerful federal government determines even how people communicate with each other, are incalculable.
Inevitably, such policies prompt non-English speaking malcontents to demand total surrender. In Riverside, California last month, a Latino crane operator failed a safety certification test. Two weeks later he sued the state of California, claiming his rights were violated because he wasn’t allowed to take the test in Spanish.
Never mind that we’re talking serious safety issues here; crane safety manuals are printed in English, operators must be able to complete required records, report unsafe conditions, and communicate at the work site. And never mind that the man has been in the country for 20 years!
One wonders if the crane operator – or his attorney – knew that on March 8 a federal District Court had ruled against PLF’s lawsuit. Judge Barry Moskowitz said the plaintiffs "did not demonstrate that they had been or would be injured by the translator requirement."
PLF says the court got it wrong. "Our clients, like all physicians who receive federal reimbursement for providing health services, face civil rights charges if they don’t provide translator services, and they face significant financial hardship if they do comply." PLF is appealing the ruling to the Ninth Circuit.
But for California doctors with Latino patients, the president of the Sierra Sacramento Valley Medical Society, Dr. Satya Chatterjee, has advanced another idea. It comes amid reports that the state’s aging Latinos are the fastest growing group in the baby-boomer category and, due to greater health woes, are likely to be heavy users of medical services. Dr. Chatterjee’s advice? (Are you listening, doctors?) Learn a second language!
Author’s Note: Founded in 1973, Pacific Legal Foundation (www.pacificlegal.org) has successfully battled government abuse on many fronts, is renowned for fighting confiscation of private property rights, special preferences on the basis of race and sex, and misguided environmental laws, and for "rescuing liberty from the grasp of government power."
Disgusting isn't it!!!!
I think there needs to be a grass-roots revolt against this law...and get it overturned, while establishing English as THE language of America...
AND, no one can get citizenship or civil services, unless they can speak, read it!
THIS IS THE NUGGET NOT TO MISS!
This simply means that people accredited by colleges or some elite government will get the gravy. Come as a better but unaccredited translator outside the program and you are out.
This simply is more welfare for radical divisive accademics in language who can't get a job otherwise. Like funding for feminists, this is funding for anarchist balkanizing agitators. MARK MY WORDS! Providers of services and the provided will have communications severed and more confused as a result of this "interpretative" imposition. Get ready for a Jerry Springer cross Kossovo like conflict all over America. Klinton learned well from Tito and Milosevitch.
> Never mind that we’re talking serious safety issues here; crane safety manuals are printed in English, operators must be able to complete required records, report unsafe conditions, and communicate at the work site. And never mind that the man has been in the country for 20 years!
I was nearly killed last year by a crane operator that was given a bad hand signal. The relay man giving the signal and the driver were both Americans. I could only imagine working with an operator who does not speak the language.
Crazy world.
Who cares about our safety indeed... if Bush and Clinton's and other elites' daughters and boyfriends get to have the free gravy train of translation/vote control at workers' expense.
We paid for their school, they did nothing, so now we have to pay for invented jobs and their retirement too. And when they will do nothing but trouble with that, we will have to pay to make it look like there's no trouble, and all will be Ok?
F that!
I smell a Ivy League con foreign terrorist con job funding here. And these people will certify what we understand from whoever we talk to, and if we disagree on that, we will have to bring more experts and more evidence, all paid by us.
So that these people can tell us how stupid and unauthoritative we are, and yet we are the ones paying for them gaining credit in authority they will not even have.
Dumbed down America is on intellectual life support, could not think, and now won't speak for itself no more.
ping
ping
Pong...
Why is it too much to ask that immigrants (legal and otherwise) learn English? I know it's hard. So are German and Russian, but that didn't stop me from learning them...at least well enough to get along in those countries.
English Only!
Protect our borders and coastlines from all foreign invaders!
Be Ever Vigilant!
Minutemen Patriots ~ Bump!
English was my second language - same for my parents, siblings, and most of our relatives. We had no special instructions, perks, phone menus, product translation or anything else like that. If you want to be a member of American society, speak the language.
Dr. Hayakawa was a visionary immigrant:
"In 1976 Dr. Hayakawa was elected to the U.S. Senate from California as a Republican. He was the first to introduce the English Language Amendment. Concerned about the growing problems caused by the language barrier, Hayakawa founded U.S. ENGLISH upon leaving the Senate in 1983. “Bilingualism for the individual is fine, but not for a country,” Hayakawa said in his support of a common official language."
"... There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts "native" before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else." Teddy Roosevelt - 1915
http://www.rpatrick.com/USA/americanism/
Ah - and one more:
"The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities. We have but one flag. We must also learn one language and that language is English," Teddy Roosevelt shrewdly observed.
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/tabor/041201
Right after the current occupant was elected, there was a bill in Congress which attempted to repeal or at least defund 13166, signed in August of 2000, in the last days of the Rapist Administration.
Here's what the Current Occupant did in response: What the Bush administration did about Clinton EO
Nice, huh?
It's going according to the plan. America was sleeping, and when we started to wake up and complain, it was too late and no one in Washington listens because they know the thinkers are outnumbered.
Many of us are now are getting a new perpective on the current occupant of the white house.
E pluribus unum -- does anyone in our government know what this means?
Liberals made us scared of Bush drinking once... but they never were scared of him going to AA Presbyterian type meetings.... the latter part was probably where the problem is.
To turn government into a professional matchmaking and free accademia services on the back of blue and white collar workers is most disgusting. They were hired by us and they can be fired, not the other way around, them jailing us as they wish.
You have no idea how non-spanish LEGAL immigrants resent the special treatment given to the spanish language.
Contrary to what the Univision anchors attempt to spin, English IS a very significant unifying part fo the united states.
Language is a tool of the culture balkenaizers.
They want to end the melting pot. They want balkanization along multicultural lines.
One only has to look as far as Quebec to see an example of the negative impact a second official language has on assimilation.
I heard today on Fox News that Chertoff is more worried about our NORTHERN border re: terrorists than he is the southern border...
He is hearing what we have---that the Canadians have welcomed these terror groups with open arms...and their social policies just play right into the terrorist's hands!!!
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