Oh look, Obama changed his mind... on Spanish

Via Babalu:
First Obama said immigrants should learn English:

Transcript:

"We'll have to finally bring undocumented immigrants out of the shadoes. It is time we did that. Now, let's acknowledge, yes, they broke the law. They should have to pay a fine, they should have to learn English, they should go to the back of the line, they should not get citizenship ahead of those who have been waiting patiently, but we also have to put them on a pathway to citizenship."

Then he changed his mind:

Transcript:

You know, I don't understand when people are going around worrying about, "We need to have English - only." They want to pass a law, "We want English-only."

Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this. Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English -- they'll learn English -- you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.

You know, it's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and all we can say [is], "Merci beaucoup." Right?

Via Memeorandum, American Voters Reject Obama's call for Bilingualism:

A national telephone survey conducted last month by Rasmussen Reports found that U.S. voters overwhelmingly disagree with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. (see video)

Eighty-three percent (83%) place a higher priority on encouraging immigrants to speak English as their primary language. Just 13% take the opposite view and say it is more important for Americans to learn other languages.

In his comments, Obama emphasized the economic benefits of learning a second language: "If you have a foreign language, that is a powerful tool to get a job." Data suggests that most voters see the issue in a broader context.

A separate survey found that one factor fueling the anger over immigration is the belief that most government officials encourage immigrants to retain the culture of their home country. This helps explain why voters who are angry about immigration are primarily angry at the government, not immigrants. Among those angry about immigration, 59% believe most government officials encourage immigrants to retain their home country culture.

Last fall, a Rasmussen Reports survey found that 77% of Americans believed that employers should be allowed to require employees to speak English while on the job. With the Supreme Court recently upholding tougher standards for voter identification at the polls, 65% of voters now believe election ballots should only be printed in English. Thirty-two percent (32%) say they should be printed in both English and Spanish.

The importance of assimilation into the culture is highlighted in another recent survey: 54% of voters say it is more important to encourage all immigrants to embrace American culture than it is to reduce the number of immigrants. Just 36% take the opposite view and say reducing immigration is a higher priority. That survey, as with many others, also found a strong preference for ballots and other government documents to be printed in English only.

Even when bilingualism is not assimilation, the fact is that you can not assimilate into a culture without a good working knowledge of its language. All immigrants should learn English, and to learn English, you have to be taught.

In a lighter vein, A different look at the race

Prior post: Bilingualism and Obama.



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Bilingualism and Obama

Obama was saying,

You know, I don't understand when people are going around worrying about, "We need to have English - only." They want to pass a law, "We want English-only."

Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this. Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English -- they'll learn English -- you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.

You know, it's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and all we can say [is], "Merci beaucoup." Right?

You know, no, I'm serious about this. We should understand that our young people, if you have a foreign language, that is a powerful tool to get ajob. You are so much more employable. You can be part of international business. So we should be emphasizing foreign languages in our schools from an early age, because children will actually learn a foreign language easier when they're 5, or 6, or 7 than when they're 46, like me.

Obama does pronounce Spanish very clearly when he does his political ads. He also does it for a political purpose. His thought that Americans should make their children bilingual in Spanish panders to "Hispanics" who are not interested in assimilating, but makes no sense vis-a-vis the argument that doing so would keep Americans from embarrassment when traveling in Europe: only a small number of Europeans speak Castillian (including, increasingly, non-Castillians born and raised in Spain). May I remind Obama that what we call Spanish in the USA is Castillian in Spain?

Andrew Leonard thinks that

There's nothing particularly exceptional about Obama's position, unless you are an English-only partisan cowering in fear of your cultural identity being swamped by funny-looking people from strange lands. Or one of the similarly insecure patriots who believe any criticism of the U.S. is a sign of "blame-America-first" treachery. And I suppose the whole comment about "going to Europe" opens Obama up to more charges of elitism, and disconnection from the lives of those who, right now, can't afford to even think about going to Europe.

Leonard clearly ignored people like myself, who are fully bilingual in Spanish, and who also can read French and a little Portuguese. Some of us are "Hispanic" (which, as I've said before is a term I use for expediency), many of us are not. I have met thousands of Americans born and raised in the USA who are multilingual.

People like myself are not "cowering in fear of your cultural identity being swamped by funny-looking people from strange lands." For starters, even when we come from "strange lands", we are not "funny-looking people". Indeed, people like me are fully integrated Americans and look like everyone else, i.e., unfunny.

What we fear is not that our "cultural identity" may or may not be "swamped", because we are secure in our cultural identity; What we worry about is that new immigrants (documented or not) who hadn't had a quality education in their countries of origin would deny themselves the opportunities our great country offers by not wanting to learn English and limit themselves to regions of the country where only their native tongue is spoken. The best paid professions in the world rely on English as their common language. India has become a dynamic economy because English-speaking jobs get outsourced to India. People how aren't willing to learn English (and I mean standard, proper, grammatically correct English) are sentencing themselves to a lifetime of poorly-paid jobs and missed opportunities.

Additionally, every country with an official second language is permanently divided. While the teaching of foreign languages (in plural - considering China's ascendancy in the global scene, Mandarin comes in handy) should be compulsory in every school in our country, English is and should remain America's language. All the original documents that created this nation should be read in the original English to be fully understood.

Which brings me to Victor Davis Hanson: his experience mirrors mine when it comes to multi-lingual America,

I was watching Obama complain that we don't speak European languages while Europeans speak English fluently. Fair enough—though the vast size of the US, the presence of two oceans on our borders, the ubiquity of Spanish here, the knowledge of other languages by millions of Americans, both explain a lot, and belie the notion that we are all English-only speakers, while the multitude of nations in close proximity has historically made Europeans by necessity multi-lingual.

Hanson, a university professor, adds the educational angle:

But that said, Obama's previous idealization of minority-theme charter schools and the need for more "oppression studies" are precisely the sorts of therapeutic curricula that ensure Americans are not getting classical instruction in languages and literatures. We still await his visit to an inner-city school where he might lecture the student body and faculty that more Latin, French, math, and Shakespeare would do more to make students competitive in an increasingly tough, global job market than thousands of hours of oppression studies and victimization classes.

Obama is wrong in believing that "Immigrants will learn English" on their own well enough to meet the challenges of any well-paid profession. Immigrants need to learn the structure, grammar, syntax and pronunciation of proper English. I know this from my own personal experience. Additionally, when it comes to the instruction of foreign languages in schools, the more classroom hours you dedicate to "self-esteem" oriented or victimization studies, the fewer hours you'll have for rigorous academic curricula of any kind, foreign languages included.

And that's not the way to favorably impress the Europeans, or anyone. TigerHawk has more on that.



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Amen to that!

Bilingual Discord in LA

Discord roils L.A. Unified parent panel
Acrimony with racial overtones has plagued the advisory council. The key issue: whether meetings in Spanish should be allowed.

For months, parents on a Los Angeles Unified School District advisory council have disagreed over whether their meetings should be conducted in Spanish or English. Such arguments became so abusive that district officials canceled meetings for two months and brought in dispute-resolution specialists and mental-health counselors.
...
They offer advice on -- and oversight of -- the expenditure of $385 million on federally funded programs for students from poor families.

What is wrong with this picture?

First of all, the public meetings of an organization bankrolled at taxpayers' expense, are being held in the United States. While the USA has no official language, the language of goverment, the language in which all the laws are written and all the documents on which our nation was founded, is English.

As the article states, the Council is managing federal funds. While there are a lot of people in the USA and undoubtedly many people in the LA School District who speak Spanish, we live in an English-speaking country.

The Los Angeles Unified School District evidently has a large number of Spanish-speaking immigrants:

Some meetings consist entirely of Spanish-speakers in a district where more than 266,000 students (and probably many more parents) are English-learners out of a student population of about 694,000.

First of all, they are English-learners; in practical terms, every immigrant family I have come across has the situation where the children have learned English even if the parents do not. And, second, even with their large numbers, they are still a minority. I expect that there are areas in Los Angeles and other cities in California where Vietnamese, or Mandarin, or Russian, is the prevailing language. California is a state of immigrants.

But the real issue is not immigration; the real issue is integration.

By demanding that the meetings be held in Spanish, a large number of attendees have demonstrated that they have no intention of integrating into mainstream America.

According to the article,

The goings-on raise another round of questions about parent participation in the nation's second-largest school system, which has been repeatedly criticized by auditors for inconsistent and ineffective parent involvement and outreach. Critics say the district rarely seeks true parental input and instead uses parents to rubber-stamp budgets and programs. District officials insist they are determined to change this perception and are making progress.

The English-speaking parents who are involved have every reason to expect that the meetings be held in English. It behooves the Spanish-speaking parents to learn the language. That is the best way they can participate in the political process.

I know so from experience.

As I have asserted time and time again, acculturation is not simply being bilingual; however, by denying themselves the opportunity to learn English, the Spanish-speaking parents are denying themselves all the opportunities this country has to offer them.

In the long term, they are also denying their children those opportunities.

Earlier this year I posted about the deleterious effect that bilingual education has on children's learning. Take a look at the world's best-paid professions; look at how India's becoming an economic powerhouse because its people speak fluent English.

The LA Times article says that a woman

considers it racist when parents are told that, in America, they have to speak English.

This is hardly surprising; after all, the best-known Hispanic activist group, La Raza, features race in its name. Additionally, pulling a race card has been used repeatedly by those who would rather not be inconvenienced into learning a language, and there's also an industry of victimhood willing to support them.

As Tony Blankley has said when talking about bilingual ed,

It is hateful of ideological "civil rights" activists to try to intimidate any politician who would dare to liberate kids from the linguistic ghetto that serves the political power of these "civil rights" activists. Once these kids have mastered English and fully entered American life, they will no longer be vote fodder for the "civil rights" activists' political ambitions.

The special interest ethnic activists prefer to have a new generation of clients, rather than a new generation of fully integrated American citizens. And what they fear is an honest and open debate on the bilingual teaching method.

Allow me to point out, again, that "Hispanic" is not a race. In the two-dozen Spanish-speaking countries in the world you can find people of every race and ethnic background.

As we watch the problems Europe has with millions of immigrants who the Europeans never integrated into their societies, it is time we insist on every immigrant's duty to learn the language and the customs of our country.

Racism has nothing to do with that. It's all about becoming Americans, and to become an American you still can remain being yourself.


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The integration debate, and what we can learn from it

The NY Times has an article on the immigration debate in France titled, In French Bid, Immigrant's Son Battles Reputation as Anti-Immigrant. In it, at least they give Sarko credit:

The possible next president of France is the son of an immigrant with a very un-French name who has done as much, if not more, than any other French official to improve the status of minorities.

He knows the pain of being an outsider and even advocates American-style affirmative action, heresy for many people in officially colorblind, egalitarian France.

The problem is that no matter how much France wants to officially paint itself colorblind and egalitarian, it is not. Everything in France is determined by who you know, what school you attend, and what colleges you graduate from. Nobody knows that better than Sarko:

Mr. Sarkozy himself has struggled as an outsider, describing himself as a "little Frenchman of mixed blood" who rose to the top of French politics without going through the normal channels of the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration as Ms. Royal did.

At the same time, France has a large minority of unintegrated aliens who have lived there for generations. Whether the French assumed that the immigrants would "naturally" become French out of their own initiative, or didn't care, the fact is that these unintegrated long-term residents, many of which are illegal aliens, have become a huge problem. While the NYT first referred to these individuals as "youths", the customary euphemism, later on in the article (13th paragraph) it does mention that the "youths" are mostly Muslim.

Sarko has favored aggressive action to integrate them into French society,

He encouraged the creation of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, which gave Islam a voice in France. He appointed the first prefect in France who is both foreign-born and Muslim. He has even argued for relaxing rules that restrict government support for building mosques.

And he supports affirmative action, which the Socialists steadfastly oppose.

In addition, Sarko has suggested that the illegal aliens be granted the right to vote in local elections. But there's one thing: he wants integration, not accommodation:

While Mr. Sarkozy has moderated his language and struck a more conciliatory tone in the presidential campaign, he did not help matters by proposing last year that France have a ministry of immigration and national identity to ensure that new citizens adhered to France's secular values.

To many people in the suburbs, the idea seemed to be a way to suppress cultural differences in favor of a traditional French way of life.

Those cultural differences have become a huge rift in the social fabric. That is always the cast when a section of the residents of a country are not integrated. Many other European countries are in the same quandary.

And that brings us to the crux of any discussion regarding immigration: integration.

In France, as elsewhere, opportunists will use the rifts for their own perfidious purposes: witness Segolene Royal's statement that

if he [Sarkozy] is elected, "democracy will be threatened," The Associated Press reported. She said she felt a "responsibility to raise the alert about the risks of this candidacy and the violence and brutality that will be set off in the country."

Political opportunism can be found anywhere in the world. Political opportunism will not get anyone integrated into anything other than discord and strife.

I have discussed immigration on Blog Talk Radio with my guests Pieter Dorsman and Siggy, and with Captain Ed; and also privately with my neighbor TigerHawk. We all have independently arrived at the same conclusion: integration is the issue.

Integration can be even more problematic when there's a religious aspect: As Pieter said in his blog after our conversation,

It is important to understand that failed Muslim integration to a large extent has resulted from the long held belief that allowing different religious pillars to exist in The Netherlands would contribute to a solution like it had in the past for the Catholic-Protestant divide on which the nation was built. The problem is that a template for neutralizing religious tensions between a culturally and economically largely homogenous group has limited use to integrate a group that both ethnically and economically occupies a different and separate world. Add to that the fact that Catholic and Protestant structures have largely become defunct in one of Europe's most secular nations and you can picture the divergent tracks in Dutch society.

Even among Catholics and Protestants, one of the things I discussed with Captain Ed is that many churches are not facilitating integration because they hold foreign-language services. The newcomers are made to remain aliens.

Important as it is, the religious aspect is only one part of the problem. Both in Europe and in the USA we now have a new kind of immigrant - those who, to use Siggy's words,

"they don't say I want to participate, they don't say I want to contribute, they say, I want".

The task of any society is to teach its citizenry what it means to be a citizen of that society. A large part of being a citizen of any society is knowing that participating and contributing is at least as important as demanding.

We are doomed to relive France's current problems in America if we don't make a concerted effort to integrate and assimilate immigrants.

In America's case, the first place to start is with language.

As I have mentioned before, children of immigrants need to learn English in order to fully master American life. For them not to master English means a handicapped life.

But acculturation is not simply being bilingual:

Prior generations of immigrants, once they arrived in the USA were taught, by the public schools and by other civic organizations, traditional American values; more specifically, middle-class, Protestant values, within a Judeo-Christian tradition. People learned to read English by reading the King James Bible. The Protestant work ethic was promoted through Horatio Alger stories, and the value of delayed gratification was spoken of. School curricula stressed discipline and the "three R's", and included famous sermons, such as Governor John Winthrop's A Model of Christian Charity. People were taught and encouraged to serve their communities through volunteering, a most American trait. In short, immigrants were directed towards what it meant to live in an American culture; no one assumed that simply knowing the language meant one was acculturated.

In today's PC environment, that has nearly disappeared from the curricula.

Today is Cinco de Mayo, a minor holiday in Mexico that is given a lot of publicity in the USA.

Here in Princeton the Princeton Shopping Center had a live salsa band (I didn't ask the musicians where they were from, but Mexican salsa is something you eat, Caribbean salsa is something you dance to), pony rides for the kids and hot dogs for all. In all, a pretty well integrated atmosphere for a festive day in truly glorious Spring weather. Cinco de Mayo's as good a name as May Madness, as far as I'm concerned, while May 5th would be even better.

By all means, have a Cinco de Mayo party, celebrate St Patricks, Columbus Day and every other holiday. I'm certainly in favor of celebrating and getting as much joy out of life as we can.

But let's not have a lesson unlearned: what the French are dealing with now can happen here.

Integration is the key.

More on the French elections tomorrow.

Update, Sunday 6 May Pieter Dorsman has an excellent article about Holland. I'll post more on it later this week.

CHANGE IN SCHEDULE: Podcast today at 11:30 tomorrow at 11AM

Upddate: We had phone connection problems so tomorrow April 24 at 11AM we'll have Angela talk about her book, hopefully without broken phone connections.
Please tune in, and thank you for your patience

Please note that Angela's travel schedule was changed by her airline, so our podcast today will be at 11:30AM
We'll be talking about her book, Bamboozled: How Americans are being Exploited by the Lies of the Liberal Agenda


Please join us!

Tomorrow on Fausta's Blog Talk Radio: Angela McGlowan

Tomorrow at noon 11:30 (please note change in time), my Blog Talk Radio Guest will be Angela McGlowan, author of Bamboozled: How Americans are being Exploited by the Lies of the Liberal Agenda


Please join us!

It's time to ditch bilingual ed

Today at RCP Tony Blankley writes about Newt, Bilingual Ed and the PC Police (emphasis added):

Likewise today, Spanish is a magnificent language proudly spoken by people around the world. But in the United States, while the language remains beautiful and noble, those Hispanic-American children who are discouraged from learning English (by a bilingual policy that retards rather than advances the learning of English) are and will continue to be culturally and economically ghettoized by their inability to read, write and speak English.

Not that Blankley or Grinwrich are saying anything new. Thousands of Hispanics have been saying the same thing.

(BTW, there are no "Hispanics" outside the USA; once we all leave the continental USA we are Puerto Ricans, Nicaraguans, Uruguayans, or whatever. "Hispanic" is a construct, and I'm using right now because it's expedient.)

Among the thousands of Hispanics who decry bilingual education is Herman Badillo, who actually introduced and was instrumental passing in Congress the bilingual voting and bilingual education programs. In his book, One Nation, One Standard, Badillo again and again realizes that

(page 65) Reexamining bilingual education, the Board of Education released a study concluding that efforts to educate tens of thousands of students in their native languages were flawed. The study found that students - even recent immigrants - who took most of their classes in English generally fared better academically than did students in bilingual programs, where little English was spoken.

(page 67) Bilingual education requires an average of four to seven years before students master english, but immersion programs accelerate that to as little as one year. Immersion's benefits are most dramatic for immigrant children in the early grades.

Last year I pointed out

Take a look at the professions where English prevails, not only in the USA, but across the world:

engineering
computers
other technology
natural sciences
medicine
financial institutions such as banks, stock markets, commodities markets, and trade in government-issued securities
accounting
economics
international law

A small amount of research will show you that those are the highest paid occupations in the world.
... While Harry Reid bellyaches about job outsourcing to China, he should take a look at the high-skilled jobs being outsourced: I guarantee you that the best Chinese engineers with world-class skills, like engineers all around the world, learned English.

Harry should also try getting hold of his friendly tech support hotline person. The odds are the person is in India. India's become a preferred place for outsourcing jobs because India's an English-speaking country. Again, English pays:

India's IT and outsourcing sector is currently worth about $22bn and expected to grow by 25% until the end of the decade, it said.

India is actively courting more investors, and its economy will continue to grow in those areas.

Tony Blankley continues, and finds the real reason for the PC outrage:

It is not hateful of Newt to point that out. It is hateful of ideological "civil rights" activists to try to intimidate any politician who would dare to liberate kids from the linguistic ghetto that serves the political power of these "civil rights" activists. Once these kids have mastered English and fully entered American life, they will no longer be vote fodder for the "civil rights" activists' political ambitions.

The special interest ethnic activists prefer to have a new generation of clients, rather than a new generation of fully integrated American citizens. And what they fear is an honest and open debate on the bilingual teaching method.

Teaching in the native language (bilingual ed) combined with ballot measures and government and consumer information in the native language is establishing a dubious result today -- as millions of immigrants are given just enough such linguistic help to let them function minimally in America (without learning English), but not enough to participate fully in our great country, economy and culture

Poor people move to this country to benefit from our riches. Denying them the instruction they need in English is, as Roger said, condemning those same immigrants to a life of poverty and bad jobs.

Every child, every adult, in our country needs to be fully literate in English. I can't say it enough.

Prior posts
Badillo speaks out on education
Krauthammer on assimilation
Acculturation is not simply being bilingual

technorati tags bilingual education, education