Florida: Official English won't amount to a hill of frijoles

[Harold F. Schiffman]

 Posted on Tue, Jul. 11, 2006

IN MY OPINION

Official English won't amount to a hill of frijoles

BY FRED GRIMM
fgrimm at MiamiHerald.com

In 1988, the hard feelings and political noise created by the Amendment 11
campaign must have made its passage seem like a thunderous event in
Florida history. The vote was overwhelming: 3,457,039 voted in favor,
664,861 voted no. And two new sentences were memorialized in the Florida
Constitution: ``English is the official language of Florida. The
Legislature shall have the power to enforce this section by appropriate
legislation.'' The outcome stunned Florida's Hispanic and Creole
communities. They waited for the next shoe to drop.

They're still waiting.

For all the anger, fear and hurt attached to the referendum, the effect,
after 18 years, has been so negligible that there has been talk lately
that Florida ought to adopt English as the state's official language.
English has been the official language for 18 years, but the effect, as
they say in America, has been bubkes. In retrospect, Miami-Dade County
Attorney Murray Greenberg deserves credit for his prescience. He told The
Miami Herald in '88, when he was an assistant county attorney, ``The
amendment says nothing. It simply leaves the door open for the Legislature
to do something big, something small or nothing at all.''

NO ACTION

The legislators chose nothing at all. No English-only laws, which might
offend constituent groups dear to both political parties, passed. And an
English-only county referendum approved by a huge margin of Dade County
voters in 1980, in the wake of the Mariel boatlift, was rescinded by the
County Commission in 1993. The only effect of Amendment 11, Greenberg
said, ``was it became a very negative symbol. People who spoke Spanish and
Creole were emotionally hurt.'' The Official English movement of the 1980s
was only the latest in a long history of reactions to successive waves of
immigrants. ``They will soon so outnumber us, that all the advantages we
have will not, in my opinion, be able to preserve our language, and even
our government will become precarious.'' That was Ben Franklin in 1753,
worried about a flood of German-speaking immigrants. A century and a half
later, Theodore Roosevelt warned, ``We have room for but one language
here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the
crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and
not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.''

Descendants of that polyglot boarding house passed Official English laws
and amendments in Florida and 26 other states, most of them in the 1980s.
But the effect was less than momentous. Dr. Mark LaPorta, who was the
statewide coordinator of the Florida English campaign, said scoundrels on
both sides hijacked the issue.

INTENT GOT LOST

The North Miami Beach physician said Monday that his original intent,
built around the notion of a single language as a unifying mechanism of
government and education, was lost in all the nastiness. He said the
dialogue (''There were elements of racism on both sides'')  became so
vicious, along with the personal threats, that he quit the cause in 1992.
Yet another wave of Official English proposals is percolating through
Congress and through state and local governments, attached to the roiling
debate over immigration policy. The City Commission in the Central Florida
town of Avon Park just approved the first reading of an English-only
provision for city business in a package that included sanctions against
businesses that hire and landlords who house illegal immigrants.

If the Official English arguments in Avon Park, in Florida or in Congress
have merit in 2006, it will be lost in the nastiness of the immigration
debate and upcoming political campaigns. After the votes are counted,
Official English, like Amendment 11, will just fade from memory.

>>From  2006 MiamiHerald.com http://www.miami.com