And 20% feel they don’t speak English “very well!”

Let the chattering commence:

“It’s very disturbing when 1 in 5 people is not communicating in the common language,” said Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. “Culturally, it creates a sort of tribalism. This country doesn’t have a predominant race or religion; it just has values. That’s a very thin bond. We have shared values and a shared Constitution; we also have to have a shared culture and language… When immigrants congregate in enclaves, they have a harder time learning English and becoming fully American… It’s time to go back to the melting pot, control the borders and let assimilation, integration and intermarriage work…”

Versus

It’s not that immigrants don’t want to integrate - it’s that they need more opportunities to learn English, said Jin Sook Lee, an assistant professor of education at UC Santa Barbara, who remembers the oversubscribed English-as-a-second-language classes she used to teach at community college…. “The fact that people speak a different language in their homes is one of the most untapped resources in our country,” Lee said. “With globalization in economics and politics, we need language competence. These speakers have a great potential to fill out this language gap in our society.”

Good points both, arguing from the two basic opposing perspectives on the still-simmering immigration debate (would you really expect less from two college professors?). They are both correct, more or less, but the split in opinion is a function of individual forecasts of prevailing politics in the next few years. Let me explain:

All research shows that immigrants are learning English at approximately the same rate as has been the norm throughout the history of the republic. Usually the 3-generation rule applies, with the 1st generation immigrants learning barely enough to get by, the 2nd generation being fully bilingual, and the 3rd generation typically being monolingual English speakers. Of course, there is great variation in this: Gov. Schwartzenegger is a handy example of a 1st generation immigrant who, despite a heavy accent, speaks English very well. There are also some groups that maintain their traditional language for freaky long times (e.g., my mother’s family, German Mennonites, came over in the 1600’s and only stopped speaking primarily German at home during WWI). The X-factor in the current immigration wave is the fact that continual replenishment of new immigrants in what has become the most prolonged immigration boom in this country’s history has simultaneously raised the profile of a single language besides English to an unprecedented degree, and has overwhelmed the rate of assimilation, resulting in a continuous growth of immigrant “enclaves.” Simply put, immigrants are coming in faster than they can be assimilated, and immigration opponents’ “doomsday scenario” is that we will eventually hit a “tipping point” wherein immigrant communities will decide en masse that there is no real benefit to assimilation as there will be plenty of goods and services offered in their own language nationally. Of course, no one can really agree as to where this tipping point would take place — to date, it’s just conjecture. There’s no need to point out that there are individuals who already reject assimilation — that just proves the fact that individuals do so, not entire immigrant populations. For every Aztlan-embracing, conspiracy-theory mongering person who bitterly rejects assimilation into the American mainstream (while continuing to demand access to its material benefits), many others proudly embrace citizenship together with its rights and responsibilities. Besides, America is rejected by some of its own sons and daughters (paging Ward Churchhill and Bill Ayers).

The real divide between the two sides comes in their conjecture on the future state of immigration. If immigration continues at the same rapid rate that we have witnessed for the last 20 years, and continues to outpace the forces of assimilation, then we will begin to fracture on ethnic/nationalist grounds. It’s the (oft unspoken) law of the world: distinct nations (re. ethnic/language groups) living together within the same country will eventually start to squabble. Imagine a headline that, say, “60%+ of all Americans speak something other than English at home.” It would necessarily mean a seismic cultural shift in the country. While the language teacher in me starts to swoon at the thought of so many bilinguals, the practical side of me looks at my birthplace (Canada) and does not wish that sort of nationalistic in-fighting on this nation. The flip side of the divide is to assume that current rates of immigration can not possibly continue unabated, whereupon one has to wonder what all the fuss is about. If immigration rates dip, and the country experiences a bit of a breather (which historically, it always has), then all present immigrants will be assimilated over the coming generations and this will all be a historical footnote. This is why last summer’s “amnesty wars” in the Senate and the House were so contentious and so important, because ultimately they proposal under discussion had the potential to cause the above headline to read nationally within 20-50 years. Of course, there are other intervening factors. The present economic downturn catastrophe is likely to put the brakes on immigration for a bit. Any serious efforts at enforcement against illegal immigration (I know, not bloody likely given the current two candidates for POTUS) would also have an effect. There was a noticeable drop here in AZ after the new employment laws went into effect this year. Any factor that deprives immigration of constant influx of “new blood” will reinvigorate assimilation. Ultimately, if immigrants view their livelihoods and well-being as being connected to the larger community — and not just an “ethnic enclave” — they will, by-and-large, embrace the English language and American culture just as previous generations have.

In my mind, I don’t understand why the language spoken at home is even a controversy. The study doesn’t say that 43% of people don’t speak English, it says that they speak something else at home. We all understand that the common language is English, that doesn’t mean it has to be spoken at home too. When we’re out in the common society,we’ll speak the common language, at home, we can speak our home language. There shouldn’t even be a controversy about how you choose to speak at home.

[…] behold, the natural counterpoint to yesterday’s article: California’s immigrants are more assimilated, with more of them reporting last year that […]