Language Issues' Influence on Immigrant Life

DEFINITION: Issues concerning unique problems that non-English-speaking immigrants face in the United States and legislative attempts to address these problems

SIGNIFICANCE: Language issues affect all aspects of an immigrant’s life in the United States. The ability to speak English correlates highly with the ability to function well. Access to information, health care, and cultural assimilation are often dependent on an immigrant’s ability to speak English.

Since its very beginning, the United States has been a country of many languages. Indigenous Native Americans spoke hundreds of distinct languages, and as immigrants arrived they continued to speak the languages of their home countries. Even though the English language became paramount, for a long time there was a general tolerance of other languages. After the Mexican Warwhich ended in February 1848 with the cession of large tracts of Mexican land to the United Statesthe two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave American citizenship to all Mexican nationals who chose to remain in the ceded lands. The treaty also guaranteed certain civil, political, and religious rights to these new Spanish-speaking American citizens. Along with those protections, it was assumed the former Mexican nationals would keep their language. There were suggestions to restrict this freedom in the country's early years, but laws of this kind were considered a threat to civil liberties.

In later years, however, various events began to change this tolerant attitude. For example, California’s gold rush attracted to the West Coast easterners who ignored the language guarantees of the treaty. In the East, anti–Roman Catholic attitudes and fear of foreign radicals contributed to a feeling of “national superiority.” Many thought it was God’s design that Americans were a chosen people and that foreigners had no place in the United States. A famous late nineteenth-century editorial cartoon by Thomas Nast depicted Roman Catholic bishops as crocodiles swimming ashore with the intention of destroying the public school system.

The onset of World War I brought language issues further to the foreront. A great number of American citizens had come from Germanymany had kept their native languageand German was used in their schools. However, with the advent of the war, those who spoke German were regarded with suspicion as unpatriotic and somehow less than totally “American.” In a speech former president Theodore Roosevelt delivered in 1917, the year that the United States entered the war, he said:

We must have but one flag. We must also have but one language. That must be the language of the Declaration of Independence, of Washington’s Farewell Address, of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Speech and Second Inaugural. We cannot tolerate any attempt to oppose or supplant the language and culture that has come down to us from the builders of this Republic with the language of any European country. The greatness of this nation depends on the swift assimilation of the aliens she welcomes to her shores. Any force which attempts to retard that assimilative process is a force hostile to the highest interests of our country. . . . We call upon all loyal and unadulterated Americans to man the trenches against the enemy within our gates.

Two years later, President Woodrow Wilson gave a speech warning against those who continued to speak the languages or pratice customs of their original homelands. Wilson complained about what he called “hyphenated” Americans, stating, “Any man who carries a hyphen about him carries a dagger which he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic. If I can catch a man with a hyphen in this great contest, I know I will have got an enemy of the Republic.”

By 1919, fifteen US states decided to make English the sole language of instruction in all their primary schoolsboth public and private. In some states, bills were introduced prohibiting teaching of foreign languages in elementary schools. These legislative efforts were, in part, expressions of public fear of foreign influences. From 1920 to 1964, American citizenship gradually became dependent on the ability to read and write in the English languageincreasingly becoming the language of government and education. One result of this tendency was that individuals speaking languages other than English began to hide their ethnic origins and to abandon ancestral languages. Millions of people were taught to be ashamed of their ancestral languages, parents, and foreign origins. Even people whose ancestors who had come to America before the Revolutionary War were told they could not keep their mother tongues and still be good American citizens. Speaking more than a single language was regarded as a sign of divided allegiance.

Foreign Workers

At various times in its history, the United States has imported people from other countries for labor. For example, thousands of workers were brought from China to do menial work during the California gold rush after 1848. Even more were brought to work on the transcontinental railroadcompleted in 1869. Like the members of many immigrant groups, Chinese immigrants tended to stay together within their own ethnic communities and speak their own language. A popular modern argument against permitting foreign immigration is that newcomers tend to isolate themselves within their own communities and refuse to learn the local language.

After the US Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980which established permanent procedures for admitting and resettling political or humanitarian refugeesthe nation opened its borders more widely to new immigrants. Russians, Bulgarians, Vietnamese, Mexicans, and many others entered the United States to find work. Some immigrants entered the United States seeking asylum because of dangerous situations in their home countries. These people are at greater risk of deportation if they can not speak English due to their restricted ability to explain their situations to immigration officialsImmigrant victims of crime often face greater dangers because of language barriers.

Education

The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 was the first piece of US federal legislation that addressed the issue of people who speak languages other than English. The bill was introduced in 1967by Texas senator Ralph Yarborough provided school districts with federal funds to increase students' English language skills. It was originally intended for Spanish-speaking students, but in 1968 it was merged into the Bilingual Education Actor Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). This law gave public school districts the opportunity to provide bilingual education programs to combat high rates of school failure. However, its real goal was to direct speakers of languages other than English into English-speaking programs. The bill provided federal funding for resources for educational programs, teacher training, development of materials, and parental involvement projects.

A central question that needed to be resolved was whether immigrants should learn to speak English before beginning to learn other subjects, or whether children should begin formal education in their native languages so they would not be too old to participate in grade-level activities by the time they developed English proficiency. The federal law gave individual school districts the freedom to choose their approach, so long as their programs were designed to meet the special educational needs of the students. As a result, in practice, only a fraction of students requiring bilingual education were given the opportunity to participate. Following the US Supreme Court case Lau v. Nichols (1974)in which the Court unanimously ruled that schools must make adequate provisions for speakers of languages other than English or those with limited-English-language prificiencythe Bilingual Education Act was amended in 1974 and 1978 to strengthen its provisions. However, in the 1980s, the federal government under President Ronald Reagan significantly reduced federal funding under the act, cutting it by 47 percent between 1980 and 1988.

Many native English speakers believed the national interest was best served when all members of society can speak English. In 2006, the US Senate introduced the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, which included an amendment to designate English as the official national language. The bill was passed by the Senate, but was never voted on by the House of Representatives, and thus never became law.

Health Care

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ensured federal money would not go to any institution that discriminates on the basis of race, color, or national origin. In addition, the US Department of Health and Human Services stated health care organizations must offer and provide language assistance services, including bilingual staff members and interpreter servicesat no cost to speakers of languages other than English. Despite this federal law, however, as much as 8.6 percent of the US population—roughly twenty-five million people—were at risk of receiving substandard health care merely because they do not speak English fluently, according to a guide published by the US Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in 2012. This is due in part to conflicts in understanding. As of 2023, thirty-two states and five territories passed laws designating English as their official languagealthough in Alaska and Massachusetts those laws were overturned in 2002, and in Hawaii English shares official language status with Hawaiianand many of the states and require all state services to be conducted in English. When state laws conflicted with federal laws, health care professionals were at a loss in knowing how to reactstate laws cannot override the entitlement of the federal Civil Rights Act.

Lack of communication between immigrants and health care providers because of language differences can cause great harm to individuals seeking health care. When doctors do not speak their patients’ native languages and interpreters are not available, misunderstandings can lead to misdiagnoses, incorrect treatments, the inability of patients to understand instructions for medications and therapy, and inability to obtain information about financial assistance. In such situations, many immigrants are understandably reluctant to seek needed medical care. In extreme situations, misunderstandings between medical professionals and speakers of languages other than English, patients can lead to deportation, financial loss, or even death.

Technology

Another area in which language issues make life more difficult for immigrants who are also speakers of languages other than English is the field of information technology (IT). As IT has played a growing role in workplaces, immigrants in generaland Hispanic immigrants in particularare often at a disadvantage when they search for jobs. According to a 2012 report by the Pew Research Center, more than one-half of Mexican immigrants and nearly one-half of immigrants from Central America had not graduated high schoolin some cases leaving them insufficiently educated to work with modern computers and electronic communications. Another, related difficulty is the fact that a great majority of websites are in the English language, making them difficult for people with limited English proficiency to understand. Much of this situation, however, had changed by the 2020s. A report by Pew Research showed the education levels of Latino immigrants greatly increased. By the 2020s, immigrants with high school degree rose to 67 percent. More than one-quarter of immigrants over the age of 25 achieved a bachelor's degree. Also, smartphone and social media usage had become ubiquitous, and thus more immigrants were more computer savvy.

Cultural Attitudes and Language Suppression

During the early twentieth century, many Americans began to espouse the idea that people who could spoke languages other than English could not be true patriotic Americans. The large number of immigrant Italians, German Jews, and Slavic peoples entering the United States from eastern and southern European countries evoked fear among American citizens that new immigrants were not learning English quickly enough, and therefore were not assimilating into American culture. In 1911 the Dillingham Commissionled by Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermontproposed a reading and writing test as a method for barring undesirable aliens from entering the country. The federal Immigration Act of 1924 introduced strict immigration rules that explicitly excluded members of ethnic and racial groups deemed to be genetically inferior. This law sharply restricted the flow of eastern and southern Europeans and totally excluded Asians. It was the first federal law limiting immigration to the United States that was intended to be permanent.

English-Only Movements

Movements to force immigrants to speak English have existed almost since the inception of the United States as a nation. Nativist efforts periodically emerged that called for the designation of English as the official language of the United Statestypically termed English-Only Movements. They took various forms and mandated critical functionssuch as education, business transactions, and government communicationstranspired only in English. These efforts typically presented themselves during times of stress,such as in wartime or during periods of demographic change.

Oftentimes such efforts focused on new arrivalssuch as immigrantsthat spoke languages other than English and had dissimilar cultural patterns. On other occasions, assimilation efforts targeted communities that, ironically, may have predated the arrival of Anglo counterparts. Such efforts took place among Native American tribes, Hispanic communities in the American Southwest, and native Hawaiians. Critics countered English-Only laws violated First Amendment provisions to Free Speech. Others interpreted such efforts as seeking to instill a cultural hierarchy within the United States with their own particular cultural community seated at the top.

In a 2019 manifestation of English-Only efforts was the attempted passage of congressional legislation designating English as the official language of the United Stateshe bill did not pass in session.

By the early twenty-first century, most immigrants appeared to believe it was in their own interest to learn to speak English. By this time, members of most Hispanic immigrant families were learning English within two generations, whereas in the past it took about three generations. Consequently, many children of first-generation families began speaking English as their primary language.

Bibliography

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Brown, Anna, and Eileen Patten. "Statistical Portrait of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States, 2012." Pew Research Center: Hispanic Trends, 29 Apr. 2014, www.pewhispanic.org/2014/04/29/statistical-portrait-of-the-foreign-born-population-in-the-united-states-2012/. Accessed 20 Oct. 2016.

Diez, Beatriz. "‘English Only’: The Movement to Limit Spanish Speaking in US." BBC, 3 Dec. 2019, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50550742. Accessed 12 Sept. 2024.

Kibler, Amanda. “Speaking Like a ‘Good American’: National Identity and the Legacy of German-Language Education.” Teachers College Record, vol. 110, no. 6, 2008, pp. 1241–68.

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Noe-Bustamante, Luis. "Education Levels of Recent Latino Immigrants in the U.S. Reached New Highs As of 2018." Pew Research Center, 7 Apr. 2020, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/07/education-levels-of-recent-latino-immigrants-in-the-u-s-reached-new-highs-as-of-2018/. Accessed 12 Sept. 2024.

Ono, Hiroshi, and Madeline Zavodny. “Immigrants, English Ability and the Digital Divide.” Social Forces, vol. 86, no. 4, 2008, pp. 1455–79. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=32796430. Accessed 14 Oct. 2016.

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United States Commission on Civil Rights. The Excluded Student: Educational Practices Affecting Mexican Americans in the Southwest. Thurgood Marshall Law Library, www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/documents/cr12m573rp3.pdf. Accessed 14 Oct. 2016.

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