Posted on 08/26/2006 9:30:40 AM PDT by Reagan Man
All across the U.S., hordes of immigrants -- legal and illegal -- are chattering away in their native language and have no intention of learning English -- the all-but-official language of the United States where they now live.
Can you blame them? They are being enabled by all those diversity fanatics to defy the age-old custom of immigrants to our shores who made it one of their first priorities to learn to speak English and to teach their offspring to do likewise.
It was a case of sink or swim. If you couldn’t speak English you couldn’t get by, go to school, get a job, or become a citizen and vote.
Nowadays we kowtow to demands that everything from ballots to official documents be presented in many native languages as well as in English.
The result? According to Census Bureau statistics reported in HUMAN EVENTS:
* In California, 42.3 percent of the people do not speak English at home. More than 28 percent speak Spanish instead. One in five Californians told the Census Bureau they speak English “less than very well.”
* In the city of Los Angeles, for example, 60.8 percent of the people do not speak English at home. Instead, more than 44 percent speak Spanish while 31.3 percent say they speak English “less than very well.”
* In the city of Santa Ana, a whopping 84.7 percent do not speak English at home while more than 75 percent speak Spanish instead, and 50.8 percent say they speak English “less than very well.”
* In Miami, Florida, 78.9 percent do not speak English at home, 69.8 percent speak Spanish instead, and 46.7 percent say they speak English “less than very well.”
* In Passaic, N.J., 72.7 percent of the people do not speak English at home, 62.9 percent speak Spanish instead, and 45.4 percent say they speak English “less than very well.”
* The 10 states with the greatest percentage of people five years and over who speak a language other than English at home are: 1. California: 42.3 percent; 2. New Mexico: 36.1 percent; 3. Texas: 33.6 percent; 4. New York: 28.2 percent; 5. Arizona: 27.4 percent; 5. (tie) New Jersey: 27.4 percent; 7. Nevada: 26.2 percent; 8. Florida: 25.4 percent; 9. Hawaii: 24 percent; 10. Illinois: 21.5 percent.
Where is all this leading? The other day I read a story headlined “Will English Survive Immigrant Flood?” As Pat Buchanan warns in his new book, “State of Emergency – Third World Invasion and Conquest of America,” if our language is gone, the conquest is complete.
What holds the country together is the commonality of language. When the Census Bureau released its American Community Survey they revealed that the U.S. continues to be inundated by a flood of immigrants, both legal and illegal. And the question this raises is are they learning out language, are they assimilating into our culture? The statistics cited above say the answer is a resounding “NO.”
Last year one in five people in Washington D.C. were immigrants, compared to one in six in 2000. According to The Washington Post, the city is one of eight U.S. metropolitan areas -- along with New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston and Dallas -- that have at least a million immigrants each.
Shockingly, a large segment of this rising population of immigrants does not speak English at home and does not intend to.
Incredibly, while huge numbers of immigrants already here refuse to learn English, in other parts of the world people are learning English just so they can come here. As I heard last year in Kenya, the students there said that English is the language of business and to get ahead in this world you have to learn to speak it.
We are really enabling immigrants to avoid learning English and assimilating into our culture because we give them everything they need so they don’t have to learn to speak English or become part of the traditional melting pot.
By enabling these people, we build an enclave for them that looks just like what they ran away from at home, thereby preventing them from assimilating and becoming part of the American dream. English is the language of business and trade -- if you can’t speak it you can’t get out of the occupational ghetto and move up the ladder. You are stuck where you are.
Tragically, the answer to the question of English surviving the immigrant invasion is probably “no.” The English language is on its death bed, a victim of the enablers.
¿Dice quién?
"Shockingly, a large segment of this rising population of immigrants does not speak English at home and does not intend to..."
Boy, just eliminate that first word of the sentence, and it makes sense...
My Grandma spoke Swedish at home until her death.
Tristemente, por aquí yo a menudo tengo que ordenar mi alimento en español si quiero ser entendido.
That assimilatative force is being diluted with all this garbage about "multiculturalism." By definition, America is a polyglot culture, but it works because it's a melting pot. All cultures subsume to the whole, which is then all things yet no one thing in particular.
Today, the tendency is to think of each culture separately -- the hyphenated American -- and to treasure each culture as a whole in itself. That interrupts the process of assimilation, breeds discontent, and exaggerates differences instead of identifying commonalities. It is a wall-building mentality, and must be defeated if the normal cultural dynamics are to apply.
One place we can preserve it is in our language. We decidedly do NOT hablamos Espanol!
Whew! Guzuntite... : )
Gracias. :)
English: The Vanishing Language
Que?
Interesting. I'm married to a woman whose grandparents came from Norway on her mother's side, and Germany on her father's side. They're long dead now, but her parents said that Norwegian and German were spoken as the primary language by those immigrants until the day they died. They learned enough English to get along, but always preferred their native language. My wife's parents speak almost not at all in their parents' languages, and my wife can't even say hello in either language.
Similarly, I grew up in a CA town with about a 30% hispanic population, back in the 50s and 60s. I had several very good friends who were hispanic. In the first grade, most of them spoke Spanish. By the end of 5th grade, they didn't even have accents. One was my best friend, and I used to spend a lot of time at his house, as he did at mine. His abuela (grandmother) spoke no English at all. His mother preferred to speak Spanish, but spoke English OK. My friend? By the time he graduated from high school, he spoke American English perfectly. He's now the mayor of that town.
Thus it is in immigrant families. Thus has it always been. It takes a couple of generations to completely remove the original language.
Those who claim otherwise simply have no experience with immigrants.
The difference between other waves of immigration is the fact that in order to survive here, people HAD to learn English. I don't remember my German grandparents telling me that they could vote in German, get government assistance for free(and in German.) The difference in this wave is that there are NO incentives for learning English becauses everything needed to survive is required by government to be in other languages, right up to having translators required where health care is given.
My birth town was almost pure Swedish until the 1950's, in fact they used to have a sign saying Willkommen, my dad who is of German and Choctaw ancestry caused quite the scandal when he married my mom who was from this town.
oops ... time warp
If we intend to keep English as it was intended to be in the style of Shakespeare and Milton, we need to teach the support languages, Greek and Latin, as well as other modern languages such as French, Italian, German, and Spanish. English by itself or in a vacuum will die.
Typical experience;
Me: I'd like a breakfast thing and a milk, please.
Them: Coke?
Me: Milk.
Them: What size?
Me: Leche.
Them: ¡Ah, leche!
Me: Thank you.
Them: De nada.
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