Your stats for poverty of immigrants are no different from other centuries of immigrants to America. The poor and disenfranchised who came here worked hard to give a better life to their children. That has been one of the major circumstances that has made our country exceptional.
I 100% agree that English has to be our official language if we are not to become Balkanized any further. I suggest one way to accomplish this is to have the condition that anyone applying for residency has to put on their application form the name of a person fluent in English who is like a sponsor for official communication.
That avoids the ‘compassionate’ rules that every institution has to provide translators or translations, including our ballots.
Ex: The form filed for every schoolchild with names of contacts will include the person who speaks English, to be a liaison to the parents of the student.
We are not the America of the late 19th Century and early 20th century. We don't need to import poverty in the form of unskilled and uneducated workers. They actually hurt us in being competitive in the global economy. Milton Friedman said that, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” We have both. America cannot take in the billions of the world's poor who want to come here.
Here is a great article by the famed Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation: Importing Poverty: Immigration and Poverty in the United States: A Book of Charts
It was Rector's seminal article that got me interested and then invested in the immigration issue. I recommend it highly to anyone who wants to learn about the issue sans emotion and old bromides. We need to reform our system in much the same way the the rest of the developed world has done, i.e., a merit based system.
I suggest one way to accomplish this is to have the condition that anyone applying for residency has to put on their application form the name of a person fluent in English who is like a sponsor for official communication.
Why such a convoluted approach? Why not make it a precondition for residency? For example, in Germany, you must pass a fluency test. They have language institutes that provide the training for the tests.
That avoids the ‘compassionate’ rules that every institution has to provide translators or translations, including our ballots.
We wouldn't need such rules if we had English as the official language including on ballots. Here in Fairfax County we went to the dual language ballot, a first for any county in VA. Immigration is the reason VA is a purple state and will soon be a blue state. 30% of the population of Fairfax County is foreign born. We are spending over $100 million a year just on ESOL teacher costs in the $2.4 billion county school budget. And we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars when it comes to educating the children of immigrants, legal and illegal. The ESOL population went up by a third just from last year to this one.
Ex: The form filed for every schoolchild with names of contacts will include the person who speaks English, to be a liaison to the parents of the student.
That is just not going to happen. We are going in the opposite direction,i.e., more accommodation for non-English speakers. Even the federal government has Spanish language cites for SS, Medicare, US jobs, etc. And many jobs are offering extra pay if you can speak Spanish whether it is the police, fire, or EMTs.