Click here to download the entire The Economic Impact of the Hispanic Population on Long Island as a printable PDF
There was a lot of encouraging news in a new report on Latinos and the English language, put out by the Pew Hispanic Institute last week. (You can read the full report here.)
While the report shows that it takes a long time for new immigrants to learn English, 88% of their adult American children are fluent English-speakers. The notion that immigration is creating a permanent non-English speaking underclass simply is not well founded.
One of the most disgraceful arguments made by the immigrant haters, like Pat Buchanan recently on MSNBC, is that Latino immigrants oppose learning English. Buchanan actually claimed that Latino organizations view the teaching of English to the children of immigrants as “cultural genocide”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I spent seven years as the Chair of the Board of the nation’s largest regional immigration coalition. Every year one of our main legislative goals was expanding opportunities for immigrants and their children to learn English and become proficient in this language of American business and civic engagement. Virtually every organization in our coalition either offered referrals to English-language training or offered the courses themselves. Most of these courses teach not only the English language, but civics and U.S. history as well.
Immigrants understand the importance of learning the English language. It is not only the road to economic advancement, but it is also the only way for a person to be a full part of our society. But, as anyone who struggled through four years of high school Spanish and emerged monolingual knows, learning a language is neither quick nor easy.
Only about one-in-four Latino immigrants feels entirely comfortable with their English fluency. Fluency rises with time in the U.S. So while only one-in-seven new immigrants feels fluent in English, nearly half of those who have spent 26 years or more here speak English well.
Also interesting is the finding that 67% of Latino immigrants use English as part of their work life.
Hopefully the current wave of anti-immigrantism will not reverse the important trend towards learning English.