More Newt Gingrich on US language policy

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Is the U.S. Government Out to Undermine English?
by Newt Gingrich

Our friend Paul Weyrich at the Free Congress Foundation had a distressing
story last week for anyone who is concerned about the future of the
English language in our country. It's a story about a charity whose good
works exemplify Christian-based dedication and compassion. It's a story
about an employer who tried to do the right thing -- to encourage its
employees to learn and speak English. And it's a story of a misguided
federal agency that is using taxpayers' money to punish those who
encourage English, rather than reinforcing English as the language of
American success and cultural unity.

Government Lawyers Sue the Salvation Army for Requiring English

The Salvation Army operates thrift stores across the United States. In
keeping with its mission to help the less fortunate, these stores both
cater to lower income customers and often employ people who might have
difficulty finding work elsewhere. The Salvation Army has a policy that
requires its employees to speak English on the job. In a 2003 opinion, a
federal judge in Boston approved of the policy as a legitimate business
practice. The next year, a Salvation Army store in Framingham, Mass., did
what I think most of us would agree was the right thing to do: It gave two
of its employees who spoke very little English a year to achieve a level
of English proficiency required to do the job. It's important to note that
the Salvation Army didn't summarily fire these two employees. Quite the
opposite. Counting the five years they had already worked there, the
employees had a total of six years to learn English. But when they had
failed to do so by 2005, they were let go.

That's when the U.S. government sued.

That's right. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a
taxpayer-funded government commission, is suing the Salvation Army, a
private, charitable, religious, non-profit group. The government is
alleging that the Salvation Army discriminated against the two employees
by requiring them to speak English on the job, thus inflicting "emotional
pain, suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, embarrassment, humiliation and
inconvenience." Now ask yourself two things: Why is the government
undermining the efforts of charities to encourage people to learn English?
And doesn't it have better things to do with our tax dollars?

The Department of Justice Also Undermines English

There's another way the U.S. government is wasting our resources in order
to undermine English in America: By filing lawsuits charging
discrimination that no one has alleged, in order to protect voters who
never asked for protection. All of us are aware of the landmark 1965
Voting Rights Act, which gave Americans who had previously been
illegitimately denied the right to vote the opportunity to participate in
democratic self-government. But as I've argued before in "Winning the
Future," the Voting Rights Act has been misapplied in recent years. One
section, for example, requires something I have long advocated be
repealed: the printing of foreign-language ballots. And the reason I
advocate this is simple: If U.S. citizenship is a precondition for voting,
and knowing English is a precondition for citizenship, then why would any
citizen exercising his or her right to vote need a foreign-language
ballot?

Bean Counting for Lawsuits

It turns out that, when the Department of Justice (DOJ) is monitoring a
city or a county under the Voting Rights Act to see if
foreign-language-speaking voters are getting the assistance they need to
vote, they don't wait for anyone to complain that they're being
discriminated against. They just comb through the voter registration
lists, count the number of foreign-sounding names, and see if it matches
up with the number of foreign-language-speaking poll workers. If the ratio
of foreign-sounding names to foreign-language-speaking poll workers isn't
what the Department of Justice thinks it should be, they sue.

The DOJ filed just such a lawsuit against the town of Springfield, Mass.
Not a single voter had complained of lack of access to the polls due to a
lack of foreign-language assistance. Still, the government demanded that
Springfield add more foreign-language-speaking poll workers in order to
ensure that foreign-language-speaking voters "understand, learn of, and
participate in all phases of the electoral process."

The government sent federal workers to monitor the election, too. They
counted 92 instances of foreign-language "voter assistance" -- 92 out of
more then 16,000 voters who went to the polls. And "voter assistance" is
defined as someone saying anything in a language other then English, such
as asking for a ballot or complaining about the weather.

The price tag for the taxpayers for the lawsuit? $435 per voter. And
that's just the federal tab.

As Edward Blum, writing in The Weekly Standard correctly put it
(subscription required), "The Justice Department has embraced the legal
tactics of a sue-happy plaintiff's lawyer: dig through a jurisdiction's
election data looking for an improperly low number of bilingual poll
workers, file a lawsuit, then muscle the local government into a consent
decree and settlement -- another scalp to add to the pile."

Better Ways to Spend Our Tax Dollars

No legitimate American voter should be denied access to the polls. And no
person should be discriminated against on the basis of his race or
national origin at his place of work.

But don't we want a federal government that reinforces English -- not one
that searches for lawsuits against learning and using English?

A far better -- and more humane -- use of our tax dollars would be for
Congress to first make it clear that employers are permitted to require
that English be spoken for legitimate business purposes while on the job,
as long as the policy is clearly posted and known to employees before they
are hired. Congress should also require that the DOJ receive a complaint
before filing a lawsuit for alleged voter discrimination.

And then Congress should create a voucher program for adult immigrants to
receive intensive English instruction. Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of
Tennessee has proposed such a program, which would allow immigrants who
want to become citizens to meet their residency requirements in less time,
thus giving them an incentive to learn English.

Allowing employers to require English on the job and insisting that
English be the official language of government does not reject or
undermine the importance of our heritage as a nation of immigrants. In
Benjamin Franklin's day, German was very widely spoken in Pennsylvania. In
the 19th Century, Italian, Yiddish and Polish became common languages in
many neighborhoods. Today, Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese and dozens
more foreign languages are spoken by Americans who are proud of their
heritage. Every American should be encouraged to learn a foreign language
in order to better understand the world. Promoting English as the official
language of government is part of supporting everyone's having an equal
opportunity to pursue happiness and prosperity.

As you have heard me say many times before, English is the language of
American success and cultural unity. Americans, new and old, deserve
nothing less than a government that seeks to protect and preserve English,
to defend the need for employers to require English on the job and to help
those who want assistance in learning English.

That would be a story we'd all like to hear.

Your friend,

Newt Gingrich


P.S. -- In France, as in the United States, real change requires real
change. Republicans and conservatives should keep their eyes on the French
presidential election over the next week. The conservative candidate,
Nicolas Sarkozy, is running as the candidate of real change, even though
he has been serving in the current president's cabinet. The Socialist
candidate, Segolene Royal, who advocates marginal change has been weakened
by a general sense that her "stand pat" policies would ruin the French
economy. As reported by the Financial Times, Nicolas Sarkozy, the
neo-Gaullist, is attacking the left wing, calling them "heirs of May
1968," and blames them for France's "moral crisis," including "violent
crime, rebellious youth, lazy benefit claimants, uncontrolled immigration
and corrupt company bosses".

Sarkozy is positioning himself as the "candidate of the people" and listed
his values as "justice, effort, work, merit and reward." A Sarkozy victory
would represent a dramatic break from the status quo and would furnish a
model for a possible Republican 2008 victory, just as Margaret Thatcher's
1979 victory was the forerunner to Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980. I'll
discuss more about this election in my next newsletter when the results
are in from Sunday's election.

P.P.S. -- I will be doing our first ever telephone town hall meeting on
American Civilization, Citizenship and English next Saturday. After the
town hall meeting, you will be able to listen to it at
AmericanSolutions.com. Next week, I will report to you on how that
experiment in a telephone dialogue about national issues worked.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=20486

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