Posted on 12/07/2001 9:51:59 AM PST by Jean S
There are more people in the United States of America today who do not speak English at home than there are people, period, in Spain.
According to new figures released by the Census Bureau, there are 255 million people in the United States over the age of five. Of these, 44.9 million (17.6%) do not speak English at home. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency says the population of Spain is 40 million.
Of the 44.9 million people in the United States who do not speak English at home, says the Census Bureau, 19.5 million speak English less than "very well."
Has America already reached the point where the density of the non-English-speaking population is so great in some regions that assimilation has stopped taking place? Has the melting pot been overloaded and broken by a combination of massive immigration and a multicultural ideology in the nation’s public schools?
Rep. Tom Tancredo (R.-Colo.) thinks so. "There are too many coming in too quickly," said Tancredo, chairman of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus. "And with multiculturalism and bilingual education in schools, it’s not a melting pot mentality. It’s a Bosnia mentality. In the school system, we encourage people to disconnect from America and to think of themselves as separate."
Rep. Lamar Smith (R.-Tex.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, agrees. "Unlike the early 1900s," Smith told Human Events, "when we had high levels of immigration followed by a hiatus, 34 years of low immigration, in order to assimilate these people, it seems we will have high levels of immigration for the foreseeable future." Smith added that "there is a great emphasis on multiculturalism, which encourages separate identities."
Michael Barone, author of The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again (Regnery, 2001), concurs that the multiculturalist ideology presents a problem in working to assimilate new immigrants. But he rejects enacting an immigration moratorium as a solution to the problem. "I would think that would be a crazy thing to do," he says. "I think we have rolling assimilation. You don’t see people staying mired in an all-Spanish environment. The fact is our economy cannot run well without substantial immigration."
Barone argues that the current crop of immigrants is as eager as its predecessors to become fully Americanized. "Go to those neighborhoods right now and see how many American flags you see," he says. "They aren’t flying Mexican flags like those nuts at the soccer game."
But the statistics emerging from the 2000 Census are staggering. Of the 44.9 million who do not speak English at home, 26.7 million speak Spanish. Of these 26.7 million Spanish-speaking U.S. residents, 12.5 million speak English less than "very well."
On top of this burgeoning Spanish-speaking population there is also a population of 6.9 million who speak Asian or Pacific Island languages.
In part, this exploding population of foreign-language speakers merely reflects an exploding population of immigrants. In 1970, 4.7% of U.S. residents were foreign born. Today 11% of U.S. residents, or 30.5 million people, are foreign-born.
That means that more than 14 million of the U.S. residents who speak a foreign language at home are, in fact, native-born U.S. citizens.
Furthermore, the foreign-born population increasingly comes from Latin America and Asia as opposed to Europe. Of the 30.5 million foreign-born residents in the U.S., 15.5 million come from Latin America and 8.4 million come from Asia. Only 4.8 million come form Europe.
In some areas of the country this population is particularly concentrated.
In California, 8.6 million of 33 million residents (26.1%) are foreign-born. Twelve million (39.2% of the state population) do not speak English at home. A full 5.2 million (15.8% of California) of the foreign-born are not U.S. citizens. Almost 5.8 million (19%) California residents speak English less than "very well."
In other words, one of every five residents in the largest state of the United States is not fluent in English.
In Santa Ana, Calif., 74% of city residents speak Spanish first.
Huh? The CIA?
If you would like this message in English, press 1. If you would like this message in any other language, please leave the country immediately.
Has America already reached the point where the density of the non-English-speaking population is so great in some regions that assimilation has stopped taking place?
I think it is worth noting that of the 255 million people in the US that the article cites, only 19.5 million don't speak english. I find I have no problem with dual language people. Of the 210 million engligh only people in the US, I suspect about 4 million (2%) speak english so poorly that it is difficult for a normal person to understand them either.
For a group of people who advocate freedom, it is amazing to me that Freepers want to condemn people for what language they speak in their own homes. If a business wants to expand its market by making its services more accessible to people who are more comfortable in another language, then that is the decision of the business. The government role should be decided as locally as possible.
Train the kids in English not treat them as dummies unable to assimilate. Mandate public services in English. Teach American pride and values- most immigrants come here for the English-speaker's society and not to reproduce their own Third World hell.
The venom should be directed at those who shape public policies that embrace Third World values.
Gee, that's half the people I grew up with in Appalachia...
Quite frankly, I don't care what language people speak at home as long as, if they intend to work here in a job that requires them to speak, they can be conversant in English. Somehow they all end up working at the drive-thru windows...
I'll tell you what, I would trade all the english-speaking, democrat/liberal voting idiots in the north east, for some Cuban American right wingers from Miami in a heartbeat..
I'm not either. My Russian-immigrant great grandparents spoke Russian at home, as did most of that generation of immigrants. Their children spoke English.
What do you so-called liberty-loving people propose, going into their HOMES and issuing them citations? Having the language police monitor the conversations in their own houses?
Disgusting.
Teach English only in the schools but leave people the HELL alone at home.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.