Quote:
Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
An honest question, because I am not deeply familiar with the naturalization process, but:
(a) How in the world do immigrants become citizens (and thus voters) without knowing how to speak, read & write basic English? They must have changed the citizenship tests a lot in the last couple of decades I suppose?
(b) If we are dealing not with immigrants, but with second generation folks from largely Spanish-speaking households, how is it that they grow to adulthood in the U.S. without knowing how to speak, read & write basic English? I guess the answer would not reflect well on our system of public education, but that is no surprise.
I have no objection to making government documents available in multiple languages, and I don't want to exclude any American citizen or legal resident from understanding and participating fully in our democracy, but I do think that a common language is one key to national unity.
So, I guess I'd say that everyone in the US who is or wants to be an "American" "should" work to learn English. In their copious spare time. I'd reccommend those Berlitz language CDS -- they can all listen in their cars.
S_A_M
|
Frankly, if it hasn't been abundently clear yet, I think this whole thing is a made-up problem. We don't write our laws in other languages, we conduct most of our business in English, and for the most part English is the language of record. That doesn't need to be made official.
Our immigration system is one of the best in the world. The people who come here want to work hard and stay here, and they do a damned good job of assimilating within a generation. And yet, we're looking at putting together a guest worker program based off the European model not even a year after the riots in France that demonstrate beautifully how disasterous those programs are.
Want to encourage assimilation? Don't threaten to send people who establish roots here away once they've exhausted their usefulness.
There is a large segment of the voting population that feels more comfortable in another language than English, and I think that making English the "official" language for voting purposes threatens their right to participate fully in democracy. And I think that the democracy is much more important than the language it is conducted in.
