We often hear it said that the United States needs an
“English only” policy to ensure that immigrants learn the national language.
The history of American immigration and assimilation shows that immigrants
quickly learn to speak English when they have opportunities to do so, and that
they no longer speak the language of their immigrant parents very well. Do you
know native speakers of other languages who are failing to learn English? What
might account for their resistance to learning English? Do you think their
children, when they attend public schools, will continue to speak languages
other than English? And what about the value of having people in our society
who can speak more than one language? Have we not learned a lesson about this
issue from our experience after 9/11, when federal authorities realized how few
Arabic speakers were employed in the nation’s intelligence agencies?