Senate Votes Twice On English Language

WASHINGTON(AP) Whether English is America's "national language" or its national "common and unifying language" was a question dominating the Senate immigration debate.

The Senate first voted 63-34 to make English the national language after lawmakers who led the effort said it would promote national unity.

But critics argued the move would prevent limited English speakers from getting language assistance required by an executive order enacted under President Clinton. So the Senate also voted 58-39 to make English the nation's "common and unifying language."

"We are trying to make an assimilation statement," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of two dozen senators who voted Thursday for both English proposals.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday that President Bush supports both measures.

"What the president has said all along is that he wants to make sure that people who become American citizens have a command of the English language," Snow said. "It's as simple as that."

Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., disputed charges that making English the national language was racist or aimed at Spanish speakers. Eleven Democrats joined Republicans in voting for his measure.

The provision makes exceptions for any language assistance already guaranteed by law, such as bilingual ballots required under the Voting Rights Act or court interpreters. It also requires immigrants seeking citizenship to demonstrate a "sufficient understanding of the English language for usage in every day life."

The Homeland Security Department is in the midst of redesigning the citizenship test and some groups have been concerned about efforts to make the test more difficult.

Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo, offered the alternative. The only Republican to vote solely for Salazar's "common and unifying" language option was Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, whose home state's constitution prohibits discrimination on basis of inability to speak, read or write English or Spanish.
Both provisions will be included in an immigration bill the Senate is expected to pass and send to conference with the House, where differences will be resolved.

President Bush, who often peppers his speeches with Spanish words and phrases, had little to say about the Senate votes while visiting the Arizona-Mexico border. "The Senate needs to get the bill out," the president said.

Bush toured an unfortified section of the border in the Arizona desert Thursday, where he endorsed using fences and other barriers to cut down on illegal crossings. The Senate on Wednesday voted to put 370 miles of fences on the border.

Bush's border visit was part of his efforts to win over conservatives balking at his support for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and a new guest worker program.

Bush asked Congress for $1.9 billion Thursday to pay for 1,000 Border Patrol agents and the temporary deployment of up to 6,000 National Guard troops to states along the Mexican border.

His request was not warmly welcomed by some key senators.

Sen. Judd Gregg, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, delayed a vote on Bush's promotion of U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman to White House budget director to show his displeasure. He said Bush's request calls for using money for proposed for border security equipment to pay for operational exercises.

Sen. Robert Byrd, the Senate Appropriations Committee's top Democrat, complained that he had offered amendments providing for border security nine times since 2002, only to have the Bush administration reject them as extraneous spending or expanding the size of government.

"If we had spent that money beginning in 2002, we would not be calling on the National Guard today," Byrd said.
A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers supporting the immigration measure continued to hold through the week. The group was able to reverse an amendment that denied temporary workers the ability to petition on their own for legal permanent residency, a step to citizenship.

Bill supporters restored the self-petitioning with the condition the federal government certifies American workers were unavailable to fill the jobs held or sought by the temporary workers.

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The bill is S. 2611

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On the Net:

Senate: http://www.senate.gov

Didn't Congress already make English the official language back in '98?



From Wikipedia: List of sovereign states with "official language" problems:

Note that only the languages that are causing political disputes in their respective societies are listed here.
• Algeria (Arabic and Berber): moderate to serious
• Azerbaijan (Azerbaijani, Talysh, and Tat): serious
• Bahrain (Arabic and Persian): serious
• Belarus (Russian and Belarusian): serious
• Belgium (Dutch and French): moderate to serious
• Cameroon (English and French): moderate to serious
• Canada (English and French, particularly in Quebec; also, to
varying degrees, English and Aboriginal languages): moderate to
serious
• Cyprus (Greek and Turkish): serious
• Estonia (Estonian and Russian): serious
• Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia and various native languages): serious
• Iraq (Arabic and Kurdish): serious
• Iran (Persian, Azerbaijani, and Kurdish): serious
• Kazakhstan (Kazakh and Russian): serious
• Latvia (Latvian and Russian): serious
• Macedonia (Macedonian and Albanian): serious
• Moldova (Russian, Moldovan, and Romanian): serious (ironically,
part of the issue is whether Moldovan is the same language as
Romanian)
• Serbia and Montenegro (Serbian, Albanian, Hungarian, Bosnian,
Montenegrin): serious
• Spain (Basque, Catalan, Galician and Spanish): serious. Aranese,
Asturian, Basque, Catalan and Galician are co-official in certain
regions. (Catalan and Valencian): serious).
• Sri Lanka (Sinhalese and Tamil): serious
• Syria (Arabic and Kurdish): serious
• Uzbekistan (Uzbek, Persian, and Russian): serious

I say that we join such advanced world leaders as Sri Lanka, Serbia, and Iraq and have a civil war over this issue.

Heres an amusing take on "official" English:

We might as well ban English, too, because no one seems to read it much lately, few can spell it, and fewer still can parse it. Even English teachers have come to rely on computer spell checkers. Another reason to ban English: it’s hardly even English anymore. English started its decline in 1066, with the unfortunate incident at Hastings. Since then it has become a polyglot conglomeration of French, Latin, Italian, Scandinavian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Celtic, Yiddish and Chinese, with an occasional smiley face thrown in. (emphasis my own )

The French have banned English, so we should too. After all, they are so rational they must know something we don’t.

More important, we should ban English because it has become a world language. Remember what happened to all the other world languages: Latin, Greek, Indo-European? One day they’re on everybody’s tongue; the next day they’re dead. Banning English now would save us that inevitable disappointment.

Although we shouldn’t ban English without designating a replacement for it, there is no obvious candidate. The French blew their chance when they sold Louisiana. It doesn’t look like the Russians are going to take over this country any time soon — they’re having enough trouble taking over Russia. German, the largest minority language in the U. S. until recently, lost much of its prestige after two world wars. Chinese is too hard to write, especially if you’re not Chinese.

There’s always Esperanto, a language made up a hundred years ago that is supposed to bring about world unity. We’re still waiting for that. And if you took Spanish in high school you can see that it’s not easy to get large numbers of people to speak another language fluently.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter what replacement language we pick, just so long as we ban English instead of making it official. Prohibiting English will do for the language what Prohibition did for liquor. Those who already use it will continue to do so, and those who don’t will want to try out what has been forbidden. This negative psychology works with children. It works with speed limits. It even worked in the Garden of Eden.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by marichiko

I say that we join such advanced world leaders as Sri Lanka, Serbia, and Iraq and have a civil war over this issue.

When you have a war with people who aren't citizens of your country, it's not called "civil war". It's "an invasion". :-)

Yeah, I've noticed how Mexican wetbacks are all bringing in WMD's.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by marichiko

Yeah, I've noticed how Mexican wetbacks are all bringing in WMD's.

You proposed a "civil war". But obviously that can't apply...

Originally Posted by Webster's

civil war a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country

invade 1 : to enter for conquest or plunder
2 : to encroach upon : INFRINGE
syn: see TRESPASS

Originally Posted by Senate minority leader Reid

While the intent may not be there, I really believe this amendment is racist.

As we all know, all white people speak English.

Well, I didn't exactly propose a civil war. Most white folk in this country DO have English as their first language. Many first, second, even third generation Hispanic Americans have Spanish. If our treatment of Hispanic people continues in the manner it has, there might well be some civil unrest (there has been already). I don't know that things would proceed to the civil war stage - I was being sarcastic.

What horrible things do you expect to happen if Spanish is made the second official language of the US? I studied Spanish in college and my eyes were opened to the things like the works of Pablo Neruda in the original, the writing of Sor Juana and the insults hurled at me by the people of Magdalena, New Mexico whose ancestors had lived there 300 years before the Anglo's came along with their English only policy.

What awful things do you expect to happen if the US officially became bilingual? At least our eyes might be opened to the doings of the Western Hemisphere which we just so happen to be a part of.

The Swiss have been a democracy since around 1200. They have FOUR official languages and the country has lived to tell the tale and has a higher standard of living than the US. In my part of the world, anyhow, I have become accustomed to messages from banks, the government and just about any larger business in my choice of either Spanish or English. Once I accidentally hit the Spanish button and was pleased that I could understand the instructions. I did NOT run out shrieking "Viva la Mexico."

So people in the US would be able to read Pablo Neruda in the original. I guess that means we'd all become Commies or something?

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by marichiko

Yeah, I've noticed how Mexican wetbacks are all bringing in WMD's.

Yes they are. Worse ones than the military could even come up with, although slower much more destructive.

[Ibby]

The provision makes exceptions for any language assistance already guaranteed by law, such as bilingual ballots required under the Voting Rights Act or court interpreters. It also requires immigrants seeking citizenship to demonstrate a "sufficient understanding of the English language for usage in every day life."

Dammit, that's exactly what we DON'T need to do

Our legal forms need to be standardized and business needs to be transacted in one language.

[Dagney]

rkzenrage - I completely agree with you. We're already translating too many documents into too many other languages ....

I can't remember exactly what title law it is, but it's one I'm dealing with in the implementation project i'm working on right now - which states - if an IT project gets any federal monies, the top 5 languages (per capita percentage) need to be represented in any out puts from the system. For the project we're currently developing, the top 5 languages are English/Spanish/Mung/Russian/And I believe Chinese. It's different for each state, and it's also different for each place within the state. (depending on the population). Whatever it is, it's a major pain in the arse.

I'll see if I can find the legal references for your reading pleasure.

[xoxoxoBruce]

That's crazy, Dagney, absolutely crazy. It's hard enough to get a program that works right in English.

[Guyute]

You guys are lucky. Here in Canada, the Feds made Canada officially bilingual, and Quebec responded by passing provincial laws restricting English, or banning it all together. Then the Fed Gov't laid back and didn't say STOP. Imagine having to write the government to request forms in English when 70% of Canada considers it their mother tongue. Or getting fined because your phone's "hold" music is not French. That crap was part of the reason I moved back to Nova Scotia. And the Federal Gov't continues to do nothing.

If you Americans don't get a hold of this problem soon, you're in deep doo-doo, because if your gov't is anything like ours, they won't intervene. They will vacillate, say that it isn't really happening, that the media are overblowing it, then the next thing you know you're fucked. "others" will exercise THEIR right to limit communication in the predominant language. Why learn English if I don't have to, right? English-speakers lose because traditionally us "English-speaking whites" are too kind and have no backbone to stand up and say "If you can't read the damn road signs then get out of the fucking car!" If the nation is primarily English-speaking, and road signs and stuff are in English, you'd expect it to be common sense that an immigrant have working knowledge of ENGLISH! Once again it is the case of the minority dictating to the majority.

Welcome to Miami shitheads... no habla Engles.

[BrianR]

And Texas south of Houston, and New Mexico, and Arizona, and California south of Los Angeles etc...I could go on.

[9th Engineer]

I'm finding myself glancing at some of the higher end language translators, both for text and for speech. Only problems are that the text translators only do well with the language in its offical and proper forms, no slang or dialects usually. Also, in general I havent found an audio translator that I like.