M
Millie123
Guest
I hear your concerns, but I do think that in todays society, they are overblown. As I said in my early post, this has been going on among immigrants since the dawn of immigration.I didn’t say it was a problem for ME I said it was a problem for immigrants if they fail to assimilate to our culture by not becoming proficient in our predominate language.Do you disagree with this? Are we to be part of the same country but live and function in separate worlds through lack of a common language? Doesn’t seem very practical.
I can show you a study about a flood of German immigrants to Wisconsin in the early 1800’s, what is interesting about their immigration history, is that like Mexican immigrants they participated and thrived in American society. However, what is different is that it took those German immigrants up to 3 generations before they became proficient in English compared to Mexican immigrants today who are actually becoming proficient in English at a much faster rate.
news.wisc.edu/study-debunks-myth-that-early-immigrants-quickly-learned-english/
“Today, 92 percent of the Latino second generation (children of immigrants) speak English “very well,” and by the third generation nearly one hundred percent of Latinos are either English dominant or fully bilingual, according to a Pew study from last year.
In the late nineteenth century, in contrast, more than a third of all residents of Wisconsin were native German speakers, and in some counties, like Hustisford, Wisconsin, 35 percent of American-born (second generation) immigrants spoke only German.”
abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/News/study-latinos-learn-english-faster-german-immigrants/story?id=19428225
As I’ve been saying earlier, your concerns are not new, but I don’t think that they are founded in fact.
Benjamin Franklin said in 1753:
“Few of their children in the country learn English… The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages … Unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious,” Franklin wrote in 1753.
abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/fear-immigrants-america/story?id=19177944
Ben Franklin wrote that 263 years ago, and I see your position as being nearly identical to his. And yet we still have a country and an English language, and our immigrants today are learning English at a faster rate than immigrants did in Ben Franklins generation.
Your argument, is still almost identical to the argument Ben Franklin made, and yet disaster did not happen because of the fact that we continued to welcome non-english speaking immigrants throughout the history of our nation. What I don’t understand is what has changed now, in that we now need to deny non-english speaking immigrants admission into our nation? And I also don’t understand why we need to make this a key election issue today.