[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 57 (Tuesday, April 30, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H4163-H4164]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      LANGUAGE AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO IMMIGRATION IN THIS COUNTRY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Guam [Mr. Underwood] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. UNDERWOOD. Mr. Speaker, for my 5 minutes, I want to speak to the 
issue of language and its relationship to immigration in this country. 
There has been a great deal of debate in recent months about the issue 
of declaring English the official language of the United States. Much 
of this movement is fueled by a sense of resentment about trying to 
deal with new, diverse elements in American society dealing with the 
pervasive sense of foreignness that many people have. People talk 
different, people look different, people act different. One of the ways 
that perhaps some people feel the way to kind of bring some order into 
this is to declare English the official language.
  There is not much we can do about such resentment except to kind of 
wait

[[Page H4164]]

awhile and see if people understand the origins of where their 
resentment comes from; but there is also allied with this a great deal 
of misunderstanding and misimpressions and a lack of information about 
what immigrants are all about.
  I want to bring some attention to a study, a recent study, done by 
Prof. Alejandro Portes, of the Johns Hopkins University, and Ruben 
Rumbaut of Michigan State, who have recently concluded a study entitled 
``Growing up American: Dilemmas of the New Second Generation,'' which I 
believe refutes many, many of the misconceptions people have about 
immigrants.
  One of the things that perhaps we need to bring to this debate about 
the role of immigrants in American society is certainly the role of 
language choice and language use by such immigrants in American 
society, in order to better inform the debate about declaring English 
the official language of the United States.
  This study collected data from over 5,000 children and is the largest 
study of its kind in recent history. There are those who want to 
establish English as the official language who believe and frequently 
try to get others to believe that English is somehow in jeopardy of 
becoming extinct because immigrants are not willing to learn English.
  In direct contrast to these assumptions, in San Diego, according to 
the Portes-Rumbaut findings, 90 percent of the respondents reported 
speaking English well or very well, and in Miami, this figure was 
over 99 percent. In fact, also sometimes advocates of declaring English 
the official language have proclaimed that immigrants have too strong a 
desire to retain their native language, a desire which I do not find 
problematic, but perhaps some people do.

  However, this study found that, surprisingly, between 65 to 81 
percent of the children of immigrants preferred speaking English to 
their parents' native language. So what we have, basically, is a 
replication of the exact same linguistic assimilation process that 
existed in this country at the turn of the century, and it has been 
largely undocumented and not well understood because people do not want 
to find out what exactly is going on in these communities.
  In fact, the exact opposite problem has been expressed by many 
immigrant communities where, in fact, language loss is occurring at a 
very rapid rate, something that should be of concern to a country 
interested in educating its children, and certainly a country that 
should learn how to value bilingualism for its own sake.
  This study also pointed out that quite contrary to the common 
assumption, if students live in kind of ethnic enclaves or 
neighborhoods where they have larger numbers of people from similar 
ethnic backgrounds, they actually are likely to learn English faster 
than people who live in more isolated communities related to their 
ethnic background. So this study challenges a lot of commonsense 
assumptions about the nature of linguistic assimilation this country.
  This really should be the basis of our understanding of why we may 
not need to declare English the official language of the United States. 
It already functions as the lingua franca of the country. There are no 
problems associated with that. Any attempt to introduce English as the 
official language is an attempt to solve a problem which simply does 
not exist.

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