Dr. Charles Krauthammer has an excellent piece today:
That is a priceless and unique asset. It is true that other countries, particularly in Europe, have in the past several decades opened themselves up to immigration. But the real problem is not immigration but assimilation. Anyone can do immigration. But if you don't assimilate the immigrants — France, for example, has vast, isolated exurban immigrant slums with populations totally alienated from the polity and the general culture — then immigration becomes not an asset but a liability. America's genius has always been assimilation, taking immigrants and turning them into Americans. Yet our current debates on immigration focus on only one side of the issue — the massive waves of illegal immigrants that we seem unable to stop.
The good doctor goes on to discuss the biggest problem of mass immigration, bilingualism:
...The key to assimilation, of course, is language. The real threat to the United States is not immigration per se but bilingualism and, ultimately, biculturalism. Having grown up in Canada, where a language divide is a recurring source of friction and fracture, I can only wonder at those who want to duplicate that plague in the United States.
The good news, and the reason I am less panicked about illegal immigration than most, is that the vogue for bilingual education is waning. It has been abolished by referendum in California, Arizona and even Massachusetts.
As the results in California have shown, it was a disaster for Hispanic children. It delays assimilation by perhaps a full generation. Those in "English immersion" have more than twice the rate of English proficiency than those in the old bilingual system (being taught other subjects in Spanish while being gradually taught English).
In effect, the idea of a national language--English--was voted in by the populations of those states. The way it is supposed to be.
I for one support English as the national language. Anyone who has lived in California and owned or operated a business there can tell you the unseen cost of a population that does not speak English.
Friday, June 17, 2005
Krauthammer
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2 comments:
I agree that culteral assimilation is immensely important.
Currently (and in the past) a common language has been required for the sharing of culture and the assimilation of culture.
I am wondering though how much longer that will be true. Computerized translation, while not very reliable now, will make it easy for people without a common language to share a common culture.
I also expect that they key to assimilation is not necessarily forcing immigrants to learn one's language, but accepting them as full, unqualified members of society despite their origin. The problem in France is not that Algierian immigrants don't speak French, it is that no French person will ever consider an Algerian (or their their decendents) to be French.
I agree with you Scott. We should be declaring English our national language. I am a big proponent of our children learning foreign languages starting at a very early age, and most likely, spanish is the most useful, but that is different than bilingual education. Students in English emersion would become bilingual and English speaking students would become bilingual through spanish, or french or whatever the case maybe...german (those were my three choices in HIGH school).
I don't find it ethnocentric that English should be our language at all. I lived in Cali like you and it is crazy out there. You absolutely need to know ZERO english to live and work there. Unbelievable.
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