That's a very complacent attitude and one that many foreigners share with you. It's disrespectful and it is counter-productive for an immigrant (illegal at that) to enter the country to reap financial rewards, but in turn, refuse to learn the language of the country in which he is bettering his life. It shows a degree of ignoranace and complacency and quite honestly, I don' think the U.S. needs that type of mentality.

The truth of the matter is that the politicians who exploit the ignorance of illegal immigrants DO NOT want them to learn the language and assimilate because they will not be so easy to dupe once that occurs. The people who actually care about the welfare of immigrants from any country know the importance of learning the language and they encourage it.



"When in Rome, do as the Romans do...."

It reply that it is disrespectful to expect someone to act like you simply because they are in your country.

What happened to rugged individualism?


With English language programs, whose funding they keep strangling.


When in a free country...

Act like it.

A nation with a representative government such as this one should always do--indeed is legally and morally obligated to do--what is in the self-interest of its voting citizens. We now have approximately 303,000,000 people here. That is enough, unless we need legal immigrants who have some special skills, talents or resources. Anything that slows down the process of illegal immigration I am for; changing the "born here" rule seems to fit the bill.

Nobody is saying "don't be an individual." BE AN INDIVIDUAL who is able and willing to communicate with the people of the country he has decided to enter. Who told you that learning the English language makes a man less of an individual? It will only add to his abilitiy to be himself. He can then express it in a way that others understand. The issue of language is one of utility and common understanding. The argument that is it somehow evil and wrong to enforce the learning of the spoken language of this country was put forward by someone who wants to hold people DOWN!!



Again, greater knowledge leads to greater freedom. The immigrant who has a command over English will have much more freedom.

Of course our population density isn't very high and most economists agree illegal immigration is actually a plus for the economy. I'd say that logic points in precisely the opposite direction.



...and if they want to learn, great.

If not, oh well.

It would be "empowering" for us to learn Spanish too. That's why we teach both languages in school.

Cuando me traslado a México aprenderé español porque me ayudará a asimilar.

My reading has always been better than my writing and I'm out of practice so I'll respond in English.

If you feel that a moral obligation to assimilate when you move to Mexico, that's simply a personal moral conviction. Learning the language would certainly help towards that goal.

Hardly a universal law.

During my years of teaching special education we had, by federal law, annual ARD (Admission, Review Dismissal) meetings for every child. Some of the parents and sometimes grandparents of those students, who attended the meetings, did not speak English. By law we were required to provide a translator.

The children, as a rule spoke English. For those new arrivals we had English as a second language programs. The problem was that in Texas, those people in charge, kept reducing the time in ESL before requiring the students to take the state test in English.

How fast a person learns a foreign language varies from person to person and I personally think its learned with less effort at a younger age.

Two thoughts.

1. There is no meit in requiring older generations to learn English.

2. Birthright people will tend to be immersed in the language and learn naturally.

We may have a red herring here.

No one is preventing anyone from learning English. But if it's possible for these people to come here and remain primarily, or exclusively, speakers of Spanish, why should anyone worry about it? As a matter of fact, I do agree that it's in the interest most immigrants to learn English, and I believe that that is why most of them do so, but I leave it each one to decide what's best for him.

Since, for liberty's sake, I willingly suffer my fellow-American to treat his chilren abominably; to cheat and to belittle his wife; to smoke tobacco until his lungs are black, even exposing his family to the same; to destroy his liver with alchohol; to go unemployed; to waste his income in gambling and similar idle pursuits; to give the Hitler salute and declare that the Jews should be exterminated; to engage in any sort of perverted sex he wants so long as with a consenting adult; to waste his time worshiping a supposed god who I am quite certain does not exist; why on Earth should I worry about what language he speaks?

Who, in the end, is the better judge of whether another American should speak in English or in any other language, him or you?

I dont have time to reply to everything, but the studies I cited refer specifically to the LA area. So, you're wrong. The problem with anecdotal evidence is that...well, it's anecdotal. Things are much broader than your perception of the world. I've provided empirical studies that soundly disproves what you're saying. People just don't understand. One, yes there's a lot of Spanish speakers, and yes, their children also speak Spanish (and can thus navigate in Spanish communities), but don't ignore the evidence! A wide majority of those children can communicate in English, and they are assimilating.

Edited to add: Bof has it exactly right.

Thank goodness someone understands how assimilation works. Everyone can wring their hands and whine that immigrants aren't assimilating, but I would urge those people to pick up a history book and learn how the waves of immigration beforehand also did not "assimilate." And the longer and harder nativists whine about immigrants note assimilating, and start demanding that they give up their cultures entirely to prove their "americanness", the more fragmented our society will be. I've already also cited studies that identity politics is a direct result from our racist attitudes towards immigrants: it really wants to make second and third generation children reassert the validity of their ancestral culture.

If an economist so argues, he misses a few key points: 1) Its illegal--duh; 2) Even if illegal immigrants allow us to improve our overall standard of living by saving us on labor costs in some businesses, allowing illegals reduces power and control--as I argue over and over, what is really important. We lose control of our culture, we lose control of our language, we lose control of our nation's unity, and we lose control of our borders. Saving a few bucks on yard care, chicken or construction hardly offsets these other losses; 3) if we were to downsize our govt and get rid of thousands of govt jobs, and then reduce our minimum wage laws in exchange for the nationlized health care and better social programs we know are coming, we'd have plenty of people newly unemployed and ready to cut grass, feed chickens and do construction work (303,000,000 people is more than enough to do anything we need to do.); 4) why in the world do I want more density? Greater density equals more pollution, more wear-and-tear on infrasturcture, greater commuting times, less undeveloped and wilderness land, etc. Let China and India see how many billions they can stuff into their borders; 5) and it puts at least some US citizens out of work, although many economists argue the jobs illegals do we won't do (adopt 3 above and we'd fix this, too).

Economists who make these arguments are only looking at the subject from the eyes of a consumer who wants lowest cost goods and services, not as a worker, a business owner who does not break the law, a nationalist, an environmentalist, a politician, or a hegemon.

About language--your language determines to a great degree how you think. In WWII, the Japanese language had no term for "retreat." The Japanese had no concept of tactical retreat and it wasted lots of men and materiel. In this sense, their language was often a very real detriment. Surely some of their American educated officers understood to some degree the concept, but they really couldn't communicate it because of the language barrier. See William Manchester's biography of Doug MacArthur, "American Caesar", for more details on this.

Language unity is very important.

In regards to the question of this thread:

Birthright citizenship is costing the taxpayers immensely. Here is one example.

According to her study, 84 California hospitals are closing their doors as a direct result of the rising number of illegal aliens and their non-reimbursed tax on the system.

"Anchor babies," the author writes, "born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income."

"American hospitals welcome 'anchor babies,'" says the report. "Illegal alien women come to the hospital in labor and drop their little anchors, each of whom pulls its illegal alien mother, father, and siblings into permanent residency simply by being born within our borders. Anchor babies are citizens, and instantly qualify for public welfare aid: Between 300,000 and 350,000 anchor babies annually become citizens because of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside."



Where does it end if we continue to leave our borders unprotected while granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens? There is a limit in everything in life, including resources.

Agreed that resources are limited, but this is not actually an issue of illegal immigrant (per se), but a lack of federal funding. One of the key problems with immigration policy is that states are mandated to provide certain resources (education and emergency medical care), yet they do not provide states with any means of funding either. In local economies, illegal immigrants tend to be a drain, because they use more in services. However, on a federal level, illegal immigrants actually bring in a surplus (and quite a large surplus), I assume due to taxes (sales and possibly income), plus they generate revenue. For more info on this, look up the Bell Policy Center, which did a great study on this in Dec. 2005. (There's also a few other sources I have on this, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.) In theory, if the government is mandating services for illegals, it should use the surplus created by them to fund the mandated programs. Otherwise, people are misguided, and blame illegal immigrants on the problem, when I would say the problem rests with the government for not allowing funding in the first place. Of course, one could argue that those children (illegal or citizens) should not be receiving those benefits in the first place, and I suppose that would have a great impact on society to have a bunch of sick, uneducated residents in the United States.

I don't think you're seeing my point. My point is that there's a powerful push in this country to take away whatever incentive they have to learn English. Whether those efforts are bearing fruit at the present time (as doomed_planet's anecdotal evidence from LA seems to suggest) or are merely portents for the future, the fact that such a strong push exists is in itself evidence that assimilation is taking a hit.

And I don't buy for a minute that all this political pressure for multilingual ballots and multilingual everything else is merely for the elderly. Look over that Ham column I posted again. This time, behold the bizarre reaction that Governor Schwarzenegger received when he advised Spanish-speaking youth that turning off the Spanish-language channel and immersing themselves in the English-speaking world (just like he himself had to do when he first came over here) was the best way to be successful.


I think there's more irony in that statement than you may realize. Yes, in a real sense we are repeating the same things as before. The earlier wave was brought to an end, not through natural causes, but through a deliberate action, borne from a sense that we were probably biting off more than we could chew. Since we got through it alright, it's easy to look back on it now and wonder what the big deal was. It ceratinly was a big deal at the time, though. It was clear that we'd been importing, along with millions of genuinely hard-working and honest people, a violent, radical element that previously had been confined mostly to foreign countries. That's not to say we didn't have a home-grown radical anarchist element also, but it was much smaller in comparison, and our immigration policies were clearly turbo-charging it. The crises of the early 20th century caused a number of republican governments to fall, and though I'm fairly confident ours would have still held up even if we hadn't scaled back immigration in the '20s, there was no need to take the risk.

And today, I don't see the need to take the risk of turning our country into a dysfunctional banana republic by adding to our ranks of citizenship voters from those cultures. Certainly not when the incentive to let go of those old cultures is being constantly lessened.



Good, all the more reason to insist on assimilation, or as it used to be known, the melting pot. That's a time-honored way of doing away with any distinction between "us" and "them" altogether. Modern PC "mosaic" ideology inhibits that process, and keeps the country divided.