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Are English-Only Laws Wrong? by Steve Sailer UPI, October 3, 2000 |
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Are "English-only" laws illegal? Should newcomers to America be able to force government agencies and private firms to communicate with them in their native tongues? Or should the government encourage immigrants to learn America's national language by conducting business only in English? Debate upon these controversial issues has been reignited by the Supreme Court's announcement that it will review a lower court's finding that Alabama illegally discriminated against a resident alien by refusing to let her take the driver's license exam in Spanish. While the legal arguments can appear technical, the case raises far-reaching questions about what life in the United States will be like in another generation. The aching feet of Mrs. Martha Sandoval, a hard-working 50-year-old maid from Mexico with nine children and a second grade education, made her the perfect plaintiff for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is run by media-savvy litigator Morris Dees. Mrs. Sandoval had been trudging 10 miles a day through the streets of Mobile, Alabama to clean homes. But after developing painful bone spurs, a doctor ordered her to walk no more. So, she began driving without a license. Why did she break the law? Because she couldn't pass a driver's test the state in English. Until the Nineties, Alabama had offered exams in other languages. Although hardly a magnet for immigrants, attracting roughly 1% as many as California, Alabama allowed newcomers to take driver's tests in Spanish and 13 other foreign languages, including Polish, Farsi, and Laotian. Alabama's experience suggests on a small scale the challenge that language diversity poses to America as a whole, where something like 300 different languages are spoken. In the New York City public schools alone, for example, students speak 115 different tongues. In the 1990 Census, 14 million people admitted they speak English less than "very well." In 1990, however, Alabama's citizens voted eight to one to require the government to take "all steps necessary to ensure that the role of English as the common language of the state of Alabama is preserved and enhanced." Unlike most states where citizens have voted to make English the official language but bureaucrats have resisted enforcing the law, Alabama's Department of Public Safety scrapped multilingual testing. Backed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union, Mrs. Sandoval sued under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Although this landmark law does not mention discrimination over language, U.S. District Judge Ira DeMent still found Alabama guilty. He ruled that the English-only policy "was adopted as a pretext for discrimination and that the Department intentionally discriminated on the basis of "national origin." While not suggesting that any particular language is encoded in an ethnic group's genes, Judge DeMent pointed to the statistical correlation between national origin and language to find that Alabama's law, while treating everyone the same, still lead to a "disparate impact" that especially harmed members of certain ethnic groups. An appeals court upheld this finding. And now the Supreme Court will consider the Sandoval case by the end of its term next June. It is not known yet if the Justices will rule upon the broad issue of whether there is a civil right to be served in one's favorite language. They may restrict themselves to the narrower but still important issue of whether private individuals like Mrs. Sandoval have the right to sue a state. Since Judge DeMent's ruling, Mrs. Sandoval has passed a new Spanish version of the test. Not waiting for the Supreme Court to make up its mind, in August President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 13166: "Improving Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency [LEP]." This essentially makes Judge DeMent's Sandoval decision standard operating procedure. It provides expansive guidelines that recipients of federal money "must follow to ensure that the programs and activities they normally provide in English are accessible to Limited English Proficiency persons and thus do not discriminate on the basis of national origin." Roger Clegg, general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, notes, "This executive order requires not just the federal government to hire translators, but also state governments that get federal money and private companies that are federal contractors." Attorney Barnaby Zall, who will be filing an amicus curiae brief in this case on behalf of Official English advocacy groups, points out, "The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is now suing private employers who have required workers to use English." President Clinton claims that his executive order will not be "unduly burdening." According to the Justice Department guidelines, "Programs that serve a few or even one LEP person are still subject to the Title VI obligation to take reasonable steps …" Clegg observes, however, "Disagreeing with the federal government over what's 'reasonable' is very expensive." Should there exist a civil right to be waited upon in one's own language? In phone and email interviews, experts clashed. Radio commentator Raoul Lowery Contreras argues that this right is implicit in the Constitution, especially for driver's license tests. "Any impingement based on language, or in this case, "national origin" seems to bump up against the right of any person to travel in interstate commerce and any individual's 14th Amendment rights of equal protection." Software entrepreneur Ron Unz, whose successful Proposition 227 outlawed bilingual education in California, advocates a pragmatic rather than a legalistic view. "I believe such issues don't lend themselves to overly broad constitutional issues, but should be decided based on practicality of the given circumstances. For example, where there are substantial numbers of individuals and/or the government cost and effort is relatively insignificant, services should be provided in other languages. If the cost is great and the benefit is low, they shouldn't be provided." Taking a traditional federalist stance, Clegg assert, "The key question is who decides who should get a license: the state of Alabama or the Southern Poverty Law Center?" He goes on to say, "Anything that removes an incentive to learn English is troublesome. In a multiracial, multicultural society, our ability to communicate with each other is extremely important -- precisely because we are multiracial." Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies scoffs, "The discrimination claim is patently absurd. Racial or ethnic discrimination by the State is unacceptable because American citizenship is not contingent on such distinctions. But that same citizenship does presuppose a common language, with which we, the people, conduct our deliberations over self-government and pass on our culture and historical memory to our posterity." One obvious way to gain perspective on this topic is to ask: Do Americans who immigrate to Mexico have a civil right to take the local driver's test in English? Of course, Mexico accepts extremely few immigrants, other than wealthy retirees. If you are planning to spend your golden years in, say, the American community at Lake Chapala outside Guadalajara, be aware that Judge DeMent's logic hasn't been accepted south of the border. According to a spokeswoman for the Mexican Embassy, you must take your driver's test in Spanish. This bias against other languages reflects Mexico's long struggle for cultural unity. With Mexico's vicious regional and racial wars of the 19th and early 20th centuries always in mind, the Mexican government has long emphasized Spanish as the glue that culturally bonds Mexico's white ruling class and its mixed race working class. On the other hand, this institutionalized lack of respect for alternative languages helps hold back Mexico's sizable underclass of Indians who speak only indigenous tongues like Mayan. A second question: Do immigrants care all that much? Or is this putative civil right of greater importance to bilingual Americans who want government jobs? Presumably, if potential immigrants consider it highly important to be accommodated in their own language, then they would have been reluctant to come to America before President Clinton's executive order. So, how concerned are they? A little-known immigration program called the Diversity Lottery sheds an interesting light on this question. The U.S. State Department hands out 55,000 immigration visas annually to randomly selected applicants from countries that don't send many immigrants to the U.S. via the normal channels. The purpose is to increase the diversity of the U.S. population. Thus, this program excludes applicants from Mexico, China, India, and the other 12 biggest suppliers of newcomers. In 1998 it admitted 20 from Burkina Faso, 80 from Kyrgyzstan, and so forth. Since these applicants generally speak languages far less familiar to American government bureaucrats than Spanish, these immigrants might suffer even more from lack of translations and interpreters than do Mexican immigrants. So, had foreigners been discouraged from applying before President Clinton's executive order? Applicants for the 55,000 annual Diversity visas numbered 5.8 million. That's more than 100 for every opening. Some analysts suggest that this controversy over multilingualism is simply the inevitable byproduct of our current immigration system. Krikorian argues: "The real issue, though, is immigration -- without mass immigration, now spilling over to the South and Midwest, there would be little pressure, or even opportunity, for such measures. With continued immigration, we will always be fighting to prevent the spread of state-sanctioned multilingualism." Others reform advocates worry less about the quantity and more about the quality of current immigrants. Contending that, "Our common language is part of the glue that holds this country together," Clegg suggests, "The ability to speak English ought to be a criterion contributing to who gets admitted into this country." There is no real shortage of foreign English-speakers from whom America could choose its immigrants. According to David Crystal, author of the "Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language," as many as 1.7 billion people speak English to some degree. Countries with large numbers of English-speakers include India, the Philippines, and Nigeria, so emphasizing English skills would do little to lessen the racial diversity of immigrants. With 100 would-be immigrants applying for every slot, the U.S. could be ten times more selective in whom it admits than the average Ivy League university. Canada offers an interesting comparison. It accepts more immigrants per capita than the U.S., but it's pickier about whom it lets in. While the U.S. admits the great majority of new permanent residents solely because they are related to some previous immigrant, Canada offers a website where anybody in the world can see whether they have the right stuff to win admission. Canada awards points for the ability to speak English or French, education, occupation, age and the like. You can test your own desirability at http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigr/guide-ce.html . Many Americans, however, find the Canadian system too coldly rational. To them, it raises disturbing questions. Wouldn't it have been harsh for the U.S. to have turned down Mrs. Sandoval just because she is, according to her testimony, unable to learn English? Should the U.S. only accept young, intelligent, well-educated, English-speaking immigrants who are likely to assimilate rapidly and pay lots of taxes? Isn't there room for humble, diligent servants with second grade educations who will clean homes for lower wages than even the poorest American citizen would charge? Steve Sailer (www.iSteve.com) is a columnist for VDARE.com and the film critic for The American Conservative.
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