Los Angeles: Immigrants' children grow fluent in English, Pew study says

Sat Dec 1 16:28:16 UTC 2007

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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-english30nov30,0,2489412,full.story?coll=la-tot-callocal

>>From the Los Angeles Times
Immigrants' children grow fluent in English, study says
Latinos see the language as the key to success, Pew research shows.
By Anna Gorman
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

November 30, 2007

Manuel Pereda, 57, spent years studying English during the day and
working as a dishwasher at night. His wife, Rosa, 54, practiced common
phrases and constantly looked up words in an Spanish-English
dictionary. The more English the couple learned, they assumed, the
better jobs they could get and the more money they could send home to
their families in Mexico. Still, despite more than three decades in
the United States, they feel more comfortable in their native
language, often speaking Spanish at home, at work and while doing
errands in their Huntington Park neighborhood. Their U.S.-born
daughter, Damaris, 20, however, speaks primarily English with her
friends, at college in Azusa and at her seasonal job at Disneyland.
She values her bilingualism but said growing up in the U.S. has made
her more articulate in English than in Spanish.

A study released Thursday by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the
Pew Research Center, reports that in families like the Peredas, for
whom Spanish is the dominant language among immigrant parents, English
fluency increases across generations. By the third generation, Spanish
has essentially faded into the background. Latinos recognize that
learning English is key to economic success, according to the study,
which was based on survey data collected between 2002 and 2007. "The
ability to speak English is a crucial skill for getting a good job and
integrating into the wider society," said D'Vera Cohn, a senior writer
at the research center, a nonpartisan research organization that does
not advocate immigration policy. "Language is a vehicle for
assimilation."

Though the findings echo the history of immigration waves in the U.S.,
experts said, they counter the widespread perception that Latino
immigrants do not assimilate and that their large numbers are a threat
to the English language. "People get very upset about 'Press 2 for
Spanish,' " said Rubén G. Rumbaut, a UC Irvine sociology professor who
has done his own research on the language issue. But "there is no way
English is being threatened by immigrants. . . . The switch to English
is taking place perhaps more rapidly than it has ever in American
history." English fluency has long been at the center of the
immigration debate in Southern California and around the nation. At
the city and state levels, language battles are being fought over
school tests, storefront signs and local ballots. In Congress,
legislators recently sparred over sanctions against employers who
require workers to speak only English.

Groups that support controls on immigration and English-only
initiatives say the federal government and U.S. companies are making
it easy for Latino immigrants to continue to speak Spanish. "The Pew
study points to some of the long-term problems," said Mark Krikorian,
executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors
conservative immigration policies. "One in eight American-born
children of immigrants doesn't speak English well. . . . And even the
grandchildren of immigrants who arrived decades ago, 6% of them still
don't speak English well. That's pretty bad news." Rob Toonkel,
spokesman for U.S. English Inc., dedicated to making English the
official language of the U.S., said the Pew report's finding that 71%
of Mexican immigrants say they speak English just a little or not at
all is reason for concern. It suggests that people don't need to learn
English because they can access any service they need in Spanish, he
said.

"In many ways, we have become an English-optional society," he said.
According to the Pew report, which analyzed surveys with more than
14,000 Latino immigrants, only 23% of adult first-generation Latinos
say they can carry on a conversation very well in English, compared to
88% in the second generation and 94% in the third. Mexicans are the
least likely to say they speak English well, which the study's authors
attribute in part to a lower educational level. The Pew analysis found
that 89% of Latinos recognize that they need English to succeed in the
United States, while 46% of respondents this year said language is the
leading cause of discrimination against them. Salvadoran immigrant
Manuel E. Mancía, 39, said he wakes at 5 a.m. each day to study
English before going to a Hollywood day laborer center to wait for
construction work. Occasionally, he attends an English class at the
center.

Though Mancía said he has learned enough in the last six years to
communicate with some employers, he believes he could get more and
higher-paying work if he were fluent. "I have lost job opportunities
because I don't speak English," he said, citing one job that promised
$15 an hour for several months. "Those opportunities don't come up
often." According to the Pew study, immigrants are more likely to
speak English very well if they are college-educated, arrived in the
U.S. as children or spent many years here.
Similar studies have also concluded that immigrants' native languages
recede over generations. Rumbaut co-wrote a study released last year
that said Mexicans and Central Americans retain their language longer
than Asians and white Europeans but that even among Mexicans, 96% of
the third generation prefer to speak English at home.

"Like taxes and biological death, linguistic death seems to be a sure
thing in the United States, even among Mexicans living in Los
Angeles," Rumbaut's study said. Johnny Rodriguez, 27, came to the U.S.
from El Salvador when he was a baby, graduated from Long Beach State
in 2003 and speaks both English and Spanish fluently.  Growing up,
Rodriguez said, he often interpreted for his parents, who didn't speak
much English. His father is a carpenter and his mother is a retired
nanny. "I felt they were put at a disadvantage," he said. The Pew
analysis also reported that 44% of Latino adults are bilingual. In the
workplace, 28% of Latino immigrants speak only Spanish and 24% report
they speak English and Spanish equally.

For Rosa and Manuel Pereda, Spanish is essential at work. Rosa sells
cemetery plots to Spanish-speaking families and Manuel, a school bus
driver, speaks English to the teachers and children but Spanish to
parents.  The Peredas say life now, compared to when they arrived in
the U.S., is much more accommodating to Spanish speakers. Except at
some medical and government offices, a Spanish-speaking employee can
almost always be found, they said. "It's changed," Manuel said. "Now
Spanish is spoken wherever."
Both said learning some English has been a struggle, in part because
they arrived as adults and had little education back home.

Often, Damaris and her siblings correct their parents' grammar and
pronunciation in English. Rosa Pereda said she and her husband are
both determined to keep practicing. "I am not thinking of leaving this
country," Rosa said, "so it's better that I understand the native
language."

anna.gorman at latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-english30nov30,0,2489412,full.story?coll=la-tot-callocal

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