Posted on 08/21/2006 1:45:31 PM PDT by garbageseeker
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).
One Nation
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at humanevents.com ...
Eglish: Learn it or Leave!
English is still the world's language of business & science.
For the time being.
Until Mandarin and Hindi take over.
You can't even be a World Cup soccer referee unless you speak English.
So if someone wants to consign their kids to a life of making hotel beds or cutting lawns, who are we to deny them their freedom to do so?
Between television and popular music, its all but impossible to keep kids speaking a parent's native tongue, IMHO.
This concern over "losing English" is a tempest in a teapot.
I agree with you.
English: I might want to use spellcheck too!
In the US, english speakers equal 270 million, spanish speakers equal 30 million. Spanish loses.
I second that. If you're gonna live in our country and take all our jobs away, the least you can do is learn OUR language and learn to speak it well. One thing that really ticks me off is calling customer service and talking to someone who can't understand you and can't talk.
I do not think we will recognize the language we call English in 500 years.
I have very grave doubts as to whether or not English will be our main languague in 150 years. By that time I think we'll likely be a third world latino backwater.
It does not negate the fact that illegal immigrants coming to this country should speak English.
Thank you very much for the information.
Eh! No comprendo Ingles!
Which is why the ATM asks you, "English or Spanish?" And why human resource departments recruit Spanish speaking managers, and why nearly all products have bi-lingual labels and instructions when they didn't 20 years ago.
That will come as quite a shock to the Asians that will own most of our real estate, equity issues and other assets by then.
My great-grandparents spoke nothing but German and attended church services in German, my grandparents spoke German when speaking to their parents and telling jokes and English when speaking to their children. My mother speaks not a single word of German.
Much of Milwaukee was German speaking around the time of WWI, with large newspapers and "enclaves." Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find a German speaker. My family from Northern Wisconsin has lost all of it's ability to comprehend and speak it in one generation.
History suggests that fears regarding the endangerment of the English language from hispanic immigration are unfounded when viewed in historical context.
NO.
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