It takes more than a language to unify a nation

[Mullins, Bill AMRDEC]

A couple of thoughts. 
 
1.  Sometimes, laws get passed to express a popular sentiment rather than to solve a real or imagined problem.  For example, I can't figure out why laws should treat beer and marijuana as differently as they do -- there seems to be no good medical or sociological reason to do so -- but people want it that way, so there you go.
 
Likewise, I would imagine that Hispanic immigrants of today assimilate at something like the rate of European immigrants of the 19th century, and that English-only laws wouldn't do much to change that process.  But Anglo people feel uneasy about the world, and want to use English-only laws to express that uneasiness.  
 
2.  Previous waves of immigrants would conduct their lives in their native languages probably like Hispanics of today do.  You had German local newspapers, Yiddish theater, Italian markets, etc.  There were Lutheran churches here in Huntsville, AL that conducted services in German to accomodate the German rocket scientists that moved here in the 1950's.   But a modern difference that strikes me (and I could be wrong), is that English speakers used to be able to conduct their affairs without having the foreign languages pushed onto them.  Now, the Lowe's Home Center near me has signs in Spanish and English.  If I buy a consumer device, I have to find the English section of the owner's manual, and when I'm looking up something, I've got to flip past the Spanish and French pages to find what I want.  The Nashville I grew up in had a dial full of English radio stations, now there are some Spanish speaking stations.  If I'm looking at the specifications of a TV at Circuit City, as often as not I've got to turn the box around because the side facing me is Spanish rather than English.  
 
All this is to say that probably some of the underlying desire for English-only laws is not so much to make immigrants conduct themselves in English, as it is to allow "natives" not to have to deal with foreign languages (primarily Spanish).
 

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