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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
color:#1F497D'>FYI (fwd from MultiEd-L) ...<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";
color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><em>-----------------------------------------------------------------</em><o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-line-height-alt:11.25pt'><em>Democracy Journal</em><o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><span class=datestamp>Issue #4, Spring 2007</span><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal><strong>E Pluribus Unum</strong><o:p></o:p></p>
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<div>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=subhed>The democratic case for bilingualism.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=byline>By Cristina Rodriguez</span><o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><a
href="http://www.democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6518"><strong><span
style='color:#3333FF'>http://www.democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6518</span></strong></a><o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:61.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif";
color:#333333'>T</span> he United States is in the midst of a demographic
reordering, brought on by levels of immigration unprecedented in American
history. The numbers are staggering: Between 1971 and 2000, nearly 20 million
immigrants came to the United States legally–almost two million more people
than entered between 1891 and 1920, the last major period of migration-fueled
transformation. Of course, as a percentage of total U.S. population,
immigrants today represent a smaller cohort than at the turn of the twentieth
century, but the acceleration of migration in recent years has been dramatic
nevertheless. Between 2000 and 2005, approximately 7.9 million immigrants
arrived here–the largest number in any single five-year period in American
history. By 2002, more than 20 percent of the population of the United States
consisted of immigrants or their children. Add to these totals the nearly 12
million unauthorized immigrants estimated to be present, and it’s no wonder
that the immigration debate has roiled the country.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>As the number of immigrants entering the United States has
reached historic highs, a variety of familiar anti-immigration arguments have
surfaced in the public debate: National security is at risk, public safety is
being undermined, and American workers are losing their jobs. But the trope
most often invoked–across historical periods and the political spectrum–is of
immigration as a cultural threat. In this view, demographic trends threaten
to dilute the common national culture that sustains the unity essential to
our self-government. A nation in which salsa replaces ketchup as the nation’s
favorite condiment, and in which public parks are filled with pick-up soccer
games as opposed to basketball or baseball, is a nation changed. More than
that, some fear, it is a fractured nation in which democracy becomes
increasingly difficult to sustain. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Throughout American history, the cultural bogeyman has
taken various forms. It has been defined by race, as with the Chinese, who
were subjected to draconian exclusion laws in the late nineteenth century and
declared inherently inassimilable by Justice John Marshall Harlan, just as he
was condemning racial segregation in his famous <i>Plessy v. Ferguson</i>
dissent. It has been given religious form, with warning bells sounded about
criminal Italian Catholics and venal Eastern European Jews–the two groups
that dominated the last period of large-scale immigration. And the arrival of
new ethnic groups has been linked by opponents to grave political and
national security threats, leading to the swift disappearance, in the wake of
World War I and Theodore Roosevelt’s Americanization campaigns, of formerly
robust German-language schools, newspapers, and clubs, and the deportation of
many Eastern European "radicals" to Russia during the same period,
for fear of their Bolshevism.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Today, these prejudices seem almost quaint. Chinese-,
Italian-, German- and Jewish-Americans have achieved success at all levels of
American society. Racial and religious pluralism, in particular, are widely accepted
as fixed (though often anxiety-producing) features of American society;
relatively few claim our survival as a nation depends on racial or religious
uniformity. But the impulse toward homogeneity and the suspicion of
foreigners have not disappeared, they have just taken another form. At least
as they are expressed in polite company, these tendencies are most often
articulated in linguistic terms. Public figures, opinion writers, and
lawmakers at all levels venerate the English language as the glue that
provides cohesion in an otherwise impossibly diverse immigrant society–what
makes <i>e pluribus unum</i> possible.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Consider the English-only ordinances that have been passed
by a number of states and municipalities in the last year. They declare
English to be our common language and emphasize that universal use of English
"removes barriers of misunderstanding" and "helps to enable
the full economic and civic participation" of all citizens, justifying
government efforts "promoting, preserving, and strengthening" the
English language. During last year’s Senate debate over whether to adopt a
national language, James Inhofe of Oklahoma worried that by taking in
"great numbers of immigrants," we are "overwhelming the
assimilation process and creating … linguistic ghettoes." Lamar
Alexander of Tennessee declared that nothing could be more important when
debating immigration reform than "talking about our common
language," which enables us to "take our magnificent diversity and
make it even more magnificent." And despite his skepticism of the
Republican-sponsored bill, Ken Salazar of Colorado, one of only two Latinos
serving in the upper chamber, offered his own amendment, supported by large
numbers of Democrats, declaring that "English is the common and unifying
language of the United States that helps provide unity for the people of the
United States."<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Though the bulk of today’s immigrants come from
multilingual corners of Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean, the language
that motivates policymakers’ concerns is Spanish–a language simultaneously
associated with immigration-fueled transformation and an old history of
manifest destiny, imperial adventure, and civil rights struggles. Indeed, as
commentators have observed, the Spanish language is to the United States
today what the Islamic veil is to Western Europe–the potent symbol around
which the assimilation debate turns. In both societies, the symbol is
described as an impediment to mutual understanding, and in both societies,
the symbol’s prevalence, whether real or perceived, challenges the cultural
security of the general population. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>This perception of a new cultural threat in the United
States is compounded by the fact that immigrants are increasingly settling
not just in border states or big cities but throughout the South and Midwest.
In towns across the country, residents are interacting with Latin American
immigrants for the very first time. Communities unaccustomed to incorporating
immigrants now hear foreign languages in public spaces, see Spanish signs on
storefronts, and grapple with the challenge of a sizable non-English-speaking
student body in the public schools. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>This new challenge is one of the factors that has prompted
state legislatures and local governments in the last few years to debate and
adopt a slew of measures designed to control immigrants and those with whom
immigrants associate. Most of the "illegal immigration relief" acts
passed by cities and towns, as well as most laws passed by states, explicitly
address illegal immigration. But it would be naïve to assume that the problem
of illegality is the only force driving this phenomenon. Many
immigration-control measures have been accompanied by official declarations
that limit the government’s authority to operate in languages other than
English–measures that affect U.S. citizens, legal immigrants, and illegal
immigrants alike. In some corners, the defense of English has been taken to
extremes. In one Georgia town, for example, a local minister was prosecuted
in 1999 under an English-only sign ordinance for advertising his church
services to the community in Spanish. A Chicago public school gained
notoriety last December for requiring students to sign a pledge vowing not to
speak Spanish while on school grounds. And in Tennessee in 2005, a
child-court judge made headlines for ordering a Spanish-speaking mother
involved in neglect and custody disputes to take English classes or risk
losing her children. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>But this fixation on language as the marker of
assimilation and the source of unity, while understandable, is misplaced. The
fact that immigrants speak their mother tongues does not mean that they are
not integrating in profound ways–that immigrants aren’t contributing to the
economy, investing in their neighborhoods, or becoming involved in politics.
On the flip side, complete linguistic assimilation does not necessarily
indicate that immigrants have become meaningfully integrated: Consider the
linguistically assimilated but otherwise disaffected second generation of
Muslim immigrants in Europe.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>In fact, the drive toward linguistic homogeneity makes the
absorption of immigrants more difficult and saps American democracy of
vitality. Bilingual individuals, institutions with multilingual capacity, and
even a self-conception as an English-dominant but linguistically diverse
nation are indispensable to a successful, self-governing American polity,
particularly in an increasingly interdependent world. Though it may seem
counterintuitive, bilingualism promotes the integration of immigrants and ethnic
minorities, enables effective citizen participation, and strengthens our
democracy and nation. In other words, we should be promoting bilingualism,
not fighting it. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal><b>American Immigration: Three Schools of Thought<o:p></o:p></b></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal><b> <o:p></o:p></b></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Currently, almost no one argues the democratic case for
bilingualism. Instead, three schools of thought dominate the debate:
conservative or "thick" assimilationism, multiculturalism, and
liberal assimilationism. With political scientist Samuel Huntington as their
academic standard-bearer, conservative assimilationists like George Will and
Newt Gingrich, who have called for an end to bilingual ballots, and the likes
of Senators Inhofe and Alexander, who along with Lindsay Graham of South
Carolina co-sponsored the national language bill, warn that today’s
immigrants, particularly those from Latin America, resist learning English.
This resistance demonstrates an unwillingness to participate in American life
and threatens the perpetuation of important public values. As Huntington put
it, "[t]here is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream
created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that
dream and in that society only if they dream in English." To
conservative assimilationists, public services translated into languages
other than English seem like a costly crutch; bilingual ballots appear to
threaten a political community that depends on mutual understanding; and
bilingual education looks destined to create ethnic ghettoes. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>On the other hand, multiculturalists weigh in by
contesting the notion of assimilation altogether. As Nathan Glazer has
explained in his work on multiculturalism, the "melting pot" has
lost its universal appeal in multicultural circles, because the idea of
assimilation "suggests forced conformity," stands "opposed to
the reality of individual and group difference," and fails to recognize
and celebrate those differences. Because of its association with historical
practices of coercion and domination, the rhetoric of assimilation is presumptively
suspect to the multiculturalist. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Finally, liberal assimilationists, who have responded to
Huntington in the pages of the <i>American Prospect </i>and the<i> New York
Review of Books</i>, adopt a posture of empirically supported avoidance,
diffusing the conservative critique by emphasizing that Latin American
immigrants are assimilating according to the standard
"three-generation" pattern. Virtually no one in the so-called third
generation, the rebuttal goes, speaks the language of his or her grandparents.
Liberal assimilationists draw support from the latest sociological research,
such as a recent study in which social scientists Rubén Rumbaut, Douglas
Massey, and Frank Bean describe the United States as a "graveyard for
languages" and document that Spanish-language usage readily disappears
across generations, even in areas of Latino concentration.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Each of these positions contains important insights.
Conservative assimilationists are correct in observing that the English
language runs as a unifying thread through a deeply diverse population, and
immigrant advancement does depend heavily on knowledge of English. But, as
the liberal assimilationists point out, this insight is hardly lost on
immigrants themselves, who fill waiting lists for oversubscribed English-as-a-second-language
classes. And the core of the multiculturalists’ position remains
compelling–ethnic subcultures not only give the life of the individual added
meaning, but they also create cohesive local communities and represent
influential and valuable dimensions of American history and culture. But,
while advocates for these three schools of thought often find themselves at
odds, these positions can in fact be bridged if we leave the Ivory Tower and
see how the language issue actually plays out on the ground.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal><b>The New Multilingual Reality<o:p></o:p></b></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal><b> <o:p></o:p></b></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Whether lawmakers succeed in passing comprehensive
immigration reform, we can expect continued large-scale migration,
particularly from Latin America and Asia. As sociologists Mary Waters and
Tomás Jiménez have shown, one of the novelties of the current wave of
immigration is the way in which ongoing flows of migration will replenish
immigrant communities for the foreseeable future. This replenishment means
that linguistic diversity will remain a demographic reality, even as the
children and grandchildren of immigrants become native and exclusive
English-speakers. Thus, based on the 2000 census, we can project that the
majority of people in the United States, by 2044, will speak a language other
than English. And some researchers speculate that English-Spanish
bilingualism may persist more strongly in the third generation than in the
past, in part because of the replenishment Waters and Jiménez document, and
in part because geographic proximity and technological advancements make
connections with Latin America relatively easy to sustain. America’s
linguistic profile, therefore, will continue to consist of a "mutability
continuum," or of complex speech communities made up of
non-English-speakers, individuals in the process of learning English, bilinguals,
and monolingual English-speakers with connections of varying intensity to
their fellow ethnics. No amount of rhetoric about the importance of
linguistic commonality will dislodge the reality that the
non-English-speaking immigrant and his bilingual descendants will continue to
be significant parts of American society.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>To the conservative assimilationist, this linguistic
diversity means that we are in danger of being unable to communicate with one
another. But that assumes that civic engagement involves one simultaneous
national conversation–with knowledge of English as the prerequisite for
joining. But our public conversations are far more varied than this model
admits. Public dialogue consists of innumerable conversations in multiple
media and in any number of languages. In fact, genuine dialogue depends on
this variety of conversations. Only a small number of voices actually can be
heard and then expressed by the national media. Subsidiary media, such as the
local and ethnic press and the blogosphere, which inevitably target
particular social groups, arise to give voice to the rest of us. In a country
that will continue to be linguistically diverse, no matter how long or high a
wall we build along our borders, multilingual dialogue will continue to be
essential to national debate. Conservatives may not like it, but it’s the
reality we face.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>The immigration reform debate that culminated in
nationwide demonstrations in May 2006 provides a case in point. It was as
close to a national debate as one could imagine, but it had a wide variety of
focal points–from President George Bush’s first major speech on the subject
in 2004 to the machinations on Capitol Hill, the public discourse filtered
through mainstream media, debates in local communities covered by local press,
and the organizing efforts within immigrant communities. For a truly national
conversation on the important matter of immigration reform to have occurred,
all of these stakeholders, including immigrants themselves, had to be
involved. The only way universal participation in this debate could be
ensured was through the mobilization of multilingual resources in the form of
the English- and Spanish-language media, bilingual organizers, and members of
the general public and the political classes capable of understanding the
multiple strands of the dialogue.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>To be sure, there are those who lament the growing
influence of the Spanish-language media and bemoan its growth as a sign of an
increasingly fractured body politic. But given today’s demographic realities,
it simply cannot be any different. An immigrant’s inability to speak English
is not a sign of refusal to learn, but rather a sign that the process of
learning a new language, not to mention becoming capable of expressing
complex ideas with ease in a new language, takes time. If we want immigrants
to be a part of American society, we need to embrace these non-English media
outlets, not condemn them. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>After all, contrary to the assimilationists’ lament, the
growth of the Spanish-language media has not isolated Spanish-speakers.
According to a 2004 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, only 6 percent of
likely voters in the Hispanic population access all of their news in Spanish;
53 percent access news only in English, and 44 percent rely on media in both
languages. In the Latino population as a whole, at least 60 percent of the
foreign-born consume news in English, a practice that grows in regularity the
more time one spends in the United States. Rather than isolating Latinos,
then, the Spanish-language media expand their horizons by creating new
opportunities for information-gathering for bilinguals and by enabling those
who have not yet become proficient in English to take part in debates of
public concern. And, as the study documents, by presenting more extensive
coverage of events outside the United States, and by generally portraying
Latinos in a more favorable light than the English-language media, the
Spanish-language media provide a crucial and distinct perspective–an
inherently valuable contribution to a society that values freedom of thought
and progress through the exchange of diverse ideas. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal><b>Bilingualism and Decentralization<o:p></o:p></b></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal><b> <o:p></o:p></b></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Of course, the type of wide-ranging national debate
embodied by the immigration marches is rare. More often, pressing issues are
debated at the local and regional level, reflecting the decentralization of
our federal system and geography. Therefore, the rules of the political game,
including the linguistic rules, can and should be tailored to fit the varied
characteristics of the population. For instance, a municipal ordinance
requiring the translation of certain essential services into six languages is
both necessary and possible in New York City, where multiple language groups
make up the body politic, but less necessary in a smaller and more
homogeneous city in the same state, such as Binghamton. The staging of a
Spanish-language debate in Texas during the 2002 democratic gubernatorial
primaries resonated with a politically significant segment of the population,
not because these voters lacked the capacity to understand an
English-language debate, but because it signaled the important status of
Mexican Americans in the political community, thus enhancing their connection
to and participation in politics. And in New Mexico, a state with a deep
Spanish-English bilingual tradition, it made sense for the state supreme
court to interpret its constitution to require the accommodation of citizens
who speak neither Spanish nor English, so that they too could participate in
community governance by serving on a jury.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Beyond the federal structure of the United States, which
allows for a degree of regional variation, there are other decentralized
aspects of participation worth considering. To strengthen participation, we
must also focus on decentralized institutions, or the places where most of
our public engagement unfolds, such as the workplace, public schools, local
social institutions, and neighborhoods. These are the spheres in which we
spend most of our waking hours and develop our vocabulary and capacities for
public engagement. Meaningful participation in these mid-level institutions
depends on forms of engagement with deep roots in the characteristics of the
community, rather than forms of interaction modeled on a perfectionist image
of the national body politic. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>What effect does bilingualism have in these venues? For
one, when public institutions can deliver translated or interpreted services,
they make themselves comprehensible and useful to non-English-speakers, thus
engendering confidence in the government and its officials. Law-enforcement
authorities with multilingual capacities, for example, are better positioned
to build trust in the immigrant communities than officials unable to
communicate in other languages. Public schools with multilingual resources at
their disposal are better positioned to educate non-English-speaking students
and involve their parents in the educational enterprise, thus facilitating
the integration of students and parents alike. Hospitals and government
agencies with the capacity to communicate with non-English-speaking
communities not only perform their functions more effectively, but they also
increase the willingness of immigrants to engage public institutions. A given
institution’s ability to develop this communicative capacity may be limited
by budgetary constraints, and the commitment to providing translation and
interpretation may not make sense until a language group passes a numerical
threshold. But, as a general matter, we should regard public investment in
language services as an essential mechanism of immigrant integration, not as
costly insulation of immigrants from the demands of assimilation. As Senator
Patrick Leahy of Vermont has put it, "[I]s it not in the interests of
all Americans to have every member of our society as well-informed on matters
of health, safety, and our democracy as possible?"<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>In a similar vein, multilingual networks can help promote
democratic habits among non-English-speakers. Again, last spring’s
immigration marches present a case in point. Spanish-language media networks
made the organization and coordination of those demonstrations possible,
turning workers into social actors willing to unite with others around common
economic and social interests. These acts of collaboration depended on the
existence of multilingual institutions, and they are precisely the forms of
concerted action that make for a better citizenry. Rather than serving as
crutches, multilingual resources enabled an engagement with the public sphere
that otherwise would have been difficult to secure, given the inscrutability
of an English-only world to a non-English-speaker. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>But bilingualism is not just a boon for the
non-English-speaking immigrant. It also advantages the bilingual individual
herself, as well as society at large, particularly in the context of the
globalized workplace. Indeed, bilingual capacity helps companies access
foreign markets, and those with language skills are in demand. Because of the
globalization of markets and the explosion of immigration from Latin America
and Asia, many employers in large cities and on the coasts have increasingly
come to value bilingualism in their employees. Yet even as human resource
journals document–and even celebrate–this trend, many employers also continue
to adopt English-only rules, often to protect the interests of monolingual
English speakers, who report feeling harassed or isolated when their
co-workers speak languages other than English. Such language restrictions
ultimately interfere with important forms of social bonding in the workplace.
They make it more difficult for bilingual employees to communicate with and
thus integrate non-English-speaking workers, and they constrain the terms on
which bilingual employees develop relationships with fellow workers. Given
that most English-only rules appear in the consumer-services sector, the
rules also distance important public spaces from the communities in which
they are located. And, perhaps most important, English-only rules insulate
customers and workers from demographic changes in their environment–changes
to which people must learn to adapt to ensure long-term peaceful co-existence
in a society of immigration. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal><b>The Need for Bilingual Bridges<o:p></o:p></b></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal><b> <o:p></o:p></b></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>It is important to recognize the distinction between a
multilingual society in which different groups speak different languages and
one in which multiple people are bilingual, a distinction often lost on
advocates of the assimilation-or-bust approach. Bilinguals possess a crucial
capacity to be interlocutors with and organizers of non-English-speaking
individuals and are an important resource in a society of immigrants. As
Justice Anthony Kennedy recognized in <i>Hernandez </i>v. <i>New York</i>, a
Supreme Court case involving bilingual jurors, "[l]anguage permits an
individual to express both personal identity and membership in a community …
Bilinguals, in a sense, inhabit two communities, and serve to bring them
closer."<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>As we face a future of continued immigration from
non-English-speaking nations, bilingual individuals will become increasingly
important to the processes of immigrant integration. Bilinguals can serve not
only as practical guides through the ins and outs of everyday American life
but also as bridges between new immigrants and broader American society.
Given our demographic realities, the United States should be committed to
developing these human resources. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>This commitment will require active investment in the
development of the country’s bilingual capacities. And that inevitably brings
us, at last, to the hot-button issue of bilingual education. Over the past
several years, the debate surrounding bilingual education has revolved around
whether English-language-learners (ELLs) learn English more effectively
through bilingual education or English-immersion courses. This concern is
understandable. The public schools, particularly in areas with many
immigrants, are overwhelmed by non-English-speaking students who require
English-language ability to perform well on state-mandated standardized
tests, let alone graduate. But as educators and policymakers focus
single-mindedly on the best way to teach English, they are squandering a
significant opportunity by giving scant consideration to native-language
retention. In effect, the English-at-all-costs mentality precludes us from
building these bilingual bridges. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Approaching ELLs as potential bridges would not mean
pigeonholing them as the bilingual education teachers and government
interpreters of tomorrow. Rather, properly valuing their native language
capacities would have long-term participatory benefits for both the
individual student and society. Those benefits include expanding the
individual’s social and economic opportunities through the development of
multilingual capacities, as well as strengthening the families and
communities integral to socialization. Children’s loss of their capacity to
speak a home language has dramatic implications for family relations, as well
as for their ability to socialize in the worlds in which they live and find
essential family support. For immigrant children to be truly effective
participants in the societies around them, they need to develop the ability
to navigate the variety of communities and institutions that comprise their
American society. Given that this enhanced socialization is likely to benefit
society at large, as well, our educational and social policies should aim to
foster it.<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>To do so, we first should reverse, through the political
process, referenda such as those passed in Arizona, California, and
Massachusetts that prohibit the use of native languages in the instruction of
ELLs. Such bans prevent state and local policymakers, in cooperation with
parents, from acting on the evidence that properly resourced
bilingual-education programs produce the best long-term results, not only
with respect to language acquisition, but also with respect to other forms of
cognitive development. In fact, education researchers Wayne Thomas and
Virginia Collier concluded in a 1997 study that well-designed and long-term
bilingual programs best promote the "cognitive and academic development
necessary" for academic success in the long run. In a 2003 study, they
also found that bilingually schooled students, over time, outperform
comparably monolingually schooled students, even though the latter initially
perform better when tested in English. They further concluded that native
English-speakers educated in two-way bilingual immersion programs equaled or
outperformed their monolingually educated peers along all measures. Yet, for
ideological reasons, native-language bans preclude any experimentation with
bilingual-education methods that could boost student performance. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Second, we need to develop programs that facilitate ELLs’
native-language retention without keeping them segregated from the larger
student population or damaging their ability to learn English. Perhaps the
best way of accomplishing this objective would be to adopt two-way bilingual
instruction as an option for all students, following the lead of school
districts like Florida’s Miami-Dade County. With the assistance of a federal
grant, Miami-Dade has implemented a program that includes a curriculum
exposing students to two languages in a 60 percent English/40 percent
"other-language" format. Such programs not only ensure that the
development of bilingualism takes place in the context of
"mainstream" settings; they also help develop in the native
English-speaking population a capacity and incentive to engage
non-English-speaking communities and cultures–an engagement indispensable to
mutual understanding in a multiethnic society and a globalized world. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal><b>Progress Through Heterogeneity<o:p></o:p></b></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal><b> <o:p></o:p></b></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Rethinking language education–much less the linguistic
identity of the United States–won’t be easy. Despite the clear benefits of
developing multilingual resources, segments of the American population always
have resisted linguistic heterogeneity. In the 1890s, for example, the <i>Nation
</i>recommended that only English-speaking immigrants be admitted to the
United States, in order to preserve the country’s linguistic commonality.
During World War I, the teaching of German was suppressed by many states and
localities, on the theory that teaching children languages other than English
inculcated them with anti-American values. And there is a long history of
punishing kids for speaking Spanish in the schoolyard, particularly in the
Southwest. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>As with the immigrant who turns to a community of
co-ethnics for support, this preservationist impulse among the
English-speaking majority sometimes reflects genuine anxieties about a
changing environment. The English-only ordinances that have appeared in the
last year underscore these fears. Absurd as it is to believe that
English-speakers require special protection, these ordinances call for
defending the rights of those who speak only English, giving voice to the
worry that growing multilingualism could translate into forms of disadvantage
for the monolingual English speaker–that job opportunities might hinge on the
ability to speak Spanish or that going about one’s daily business might be
complicated by having to interact with people who do not speak English. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>But why not treat this anxiety the way we would handle
other shifts that have resulted from the emergence of the information economy
and globalization? Instead of retrenching into an old world that cannot be
recaptured, we should focus on providing people with the incentives and
resources for adaptation, which in this case would mean giving all Americans
the tools to operate in a bilingual world. Ironically, the English-dominant
majority’s resistance to change and the creation of obstacles to the
development of bilingualism ultimately repeat the multiculturalists’ chief
mistake: resisting the assimilation that demographic change inevitably
demands of us. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>In the end, we should regard confronting differences as
essential to self and mutual understanding. Politics is not just about
finding points of commonality and proceeding from them. It is also about
challenging one another with our differences. The end result will be a
society transformed, but that society will in fact be more coherent for
having faced the differences in the population directly rather than having
tried to suppress them with rules that posit a uniformity that does not
exist. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>Controversies over immigrant assimilation put me in mind
of my late Cuban grandfather, who came to the United States as an adult in
1965. He embraced his new home, proudly wearing the cowboy hat of his adopted
state of Texas and quickly learning sufficient English to run his own medical
practice with my grandmother. Like many grandfathers, he spent his free time
making aphoristic pronouncements to his grandchildren. Among his advice was
his belief that <i>el que sabe más, vale más</i>: He who knows more, has more
value. It was his way of encouraging me, my sisters, and my cousins to
maintain the native Spanish-speaking ability we had been given by our parents
and grandparents, even as we grew up English-dominant Americans. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal> <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal>If, as a country, we took to heart my grandfather’s
insight, we might just diffuse the charged terms of the language debate. We
would worry less that linguistic diversity signals immigrants’ failure to
assimilate and be confident instead in immigrants’ strong desire to learn
English and improve their lives. But we also would acknowledge the real
benefits that bilingualism brings and put it to work uniting our diverse
people into a strong America democracy. <o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:7.5pt'><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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