2. My great grandmothers never learned English. There was no American mass media (other than radio, which was largely local), and they lived in SEGREGATED ethnic enclaves. Do you folks actually think that the Anglos went into Polish or Italian neighborhoods? Were there even ANY Anglos in Newark (unless you count the Irish?). The WASPS fled like hell from the northeast thanks to my ancestors.
You need to learn English to get ahead in life, and GOVERNMENT SPONSORED bilingualism (aka documents in Chinese, Spanish, Russian, etc, as in New York) is WRONG. Nevertheless, if a private business decides to promote themselves in Spanish, English, or Esperanto (including such choices in their automated phone messages), that's their prerogative.
Comparing the current crop of illegals to the immigrants that came before them in prior generations is disingenuous - they came here, assimilated, were definitely NOT catered to, and didn't exhaust our nation's resources by demanding public services to which they have no right.
Exactly. That's the problem. I worked in a polling place in San Francisco where we had the ballots in Chinese as well as English. A bunch of Dem "activists" brought busloads of Chinese grannies to vote. They didn't speak English, of course, but they also didn't read the Chinese the ballot was printed in (in fact, they were probably illiterate in any language), but the Dems got to send "helpers" into the booths to help them vote with the Chinese ballots. Since they "helped" them in Chinese, none of the polling place workers knew what they were saying anyway, and the Dems were essentially just pointing to the dot to punch and guiding the elderly Chinese hands to the appropriate Dem candidate.
Because it is a clear indication that a large and fastest growing segment of the resident population (Hispanics) really is not fluent in English. After all, why do you think that you don't hear same offer for people who speak French, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Russian, Greek, Japanese, Hungarian, Hindi, etc. Apparently those sorts of people don't exist.
These government agencies and corporations know exactly what they are doing. Setting up groups of services in more than one language is a very expensive and time consuming endeavor. You don't do something like that unless it is truly necessary to reach a very large percentage of people. And again, that group is the fastest growing segment of our society.
If we don't reform our immigration laws the southwest will evolve into our own Quebec.