Posted on 04/27/2010 8:24:26 PM PDT by Altura Ct.
easy to support this one...I’d like to see more of it....
I live in Alabama, and we have more international residents than you may imagine. Two of our major employers are a Honda plant and a Mercedes plant. In Birmingham, the largest city in Alabama, the largest employer is our medical university and its hospital - an internationally recognized hospital with groundbreaking research being done in numerous fields.
Students from around the world come to this university to study medicine. And of course, businessmen from Japan and Germany come to visit their respective auto plants. All of these people put money into our state economy - not just by paying tuition or running a business, but by buying groceries, renting an apartment, buying a home, and yes, buying a car. Refusing the temporary, long term, and potentially permanent residents the right to take a driver’s test in the language they are most comfortable with would hurt the state’s economy far more than whatever small price we incur to make copies of tests that are already translated into these languages.
While the article states that James also makes note of accidents caused by drivers who can’t read street signs, I can’t help but wonder how many of those accidents are caused by people driving illegally without a license, or even by English-speaking residents driving without their glasses on. Our written driving exam includes street signs. The street test is very strict, and a person failing to recognize the meaning of a street sign would definitely fail it.
Furthermore, the ads being televised locally make no mention of accidents - the only argument made is that it’s a waste of money to offer the driving exam in a number of languages. I was working at a bank when we began to offer the option of choosing Spanish at our ATM machines. Why offer Spanish? Not for politics, not because anyone was forcing us to, but to make more money. Serving your customers MAKES money, it never WASTES money.
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