Speech #1040204509

Mr. Speaker. for my 5 minutes. I want to speak to the issue of language and its relationship to immigration in this country. There has been a great deal of debate in recent months about the issue of declaring English the official language of the United States. Much of this movement is fueled by a sense of resentment about trying to deal with new. diverse elements in American society dealing with the pervasive sense of foreignness that many people have. People talk different. people look different. people act different. One of the ways that perhaps some people feel the way to kind of bring some order into this is to declare English the official language. There is not much we can do about such resentment except to kind of wait awhile and see if people understand the origins of where their resentment comes from. but there is also allied with this a great deal of misunderstanding and misimpressions and a lack of information about what immigrants are all about. I want to bring some attention to a study. a recent study. done by Prof. Alejandro Portes. of the Johns Hopkins University. and Ruben Rumbaut of Michigan State. who have recently concluded a study entitled "Growing up American: Dilemmas of the New Second Generation." which I believe refutes many. many of the misconceptions people have about immigrants. One of the things that perhaps we need to bring to this debate about the role of immigrants in American society is certainly the role of language choice and language use by such immigrants in American society. in order to better inform the debate about declaring English the official language of the United States. This study collected data from over 5.000 children and is the largest study of its kind in recent history. There are those who want to establish English as the official language who believe and frequently try to get others to believe that English is somehow in jeopardy of becoming extinct because immigrants are not willing to learn English. In direct contrast to these assumptions. in San Diego. according to the PortesRumbaut findings. 90 percent of the respondents reported speaking English well or very well. and in Miami. this figure was over 99 percent. In fact. also sometimes advocates of declaring English the official language have proclaimed that immigrants have too strong a desire to retain their native language. a desire which I do not find problematic. but perhaps some people do. However. this study found that. surprisingly. between 65 to 81 percent of the children of immigrants preferred speaking English to their parents native language. So what we have. basically. is a replication of the exact same linguistic assimilation process that existed in this country at the turn of the century. and it has been largely undocumented and not well understood because people do not want to find out what exactly is going on in these communities. In fact. the exact opposite problem has been expressed by many immigrant communities where. in fact. language loss is occurring at a very rapid rate. something that should be of concern to a country interested in educating its children. and certainly a country that should learn how to value bilingualism for its own sake. This study also pointed out that quite contrary to the common assumption. if students live in kind of ethnic enclaves or neighborhoods where they have larger numbers of people from similar ethnic backgrounds. they actually are likely to learn English faster than people who live in more isolated communities related to their ethnic background. So this study challenges a lot of commonsense assumptions about the nature of linguistic assimilation this country.