Learn English First
Presidential Candidate Barak Obama believes we should learn Spanish instead of making the immigrants learn English. However as the Powerline blog reports according to a Rasmussen poll 83 percent of respondents want the immigrants to learn English as their primary language instead of learning a second language.
Does this make us all ignorant? Or should we as Americans expect people who live here learn the language?
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I’ve never heard a compelling reason for making English America’s only language. “That’s how our nation was founded” and “That’s how it’s always been” aren’t real reasons.
I think that there is a powerful economic incentive for immigrants to learn English. It’s a waste of government time and money to encourage people who don’t want to learn english to learn it.
I would agree as well the “That’s how our nation was founded” is not a real reason either. I would agree there is a great economic incentive to learn English. However it seems to me this is lessoning as more and more of American life is in Spanish. Everything at Lowe’s for example is bi-lingually labeled. You can’t find a Gift Card that is just in English.
Stunning. Simply stunning. So if we have to learn every immigrant’s language, that means I gotta learn every single language on the planet. Why give special favors to the Spanish-Americans?
Seems to me Obama’s being racist against non-Spanish speaking people. Heck, Chinese is the most used language in the world. Why not that, Mr. Obama?
I believe the title of this post “Learn English First” shows that the point is NOT that citizens should avoid learning a second language. The United States Government has unwittingly undermined national unity by printing official documents in Spanish as well as English. I’m also convinced that it was done for partisan political motives—a desire to gain votes from another minority group in the nation—not for the good of the country and its people.
If we are going to have a second language in the United States, I believe it ought to be German, French, or Italian—- languages in which significant literature has been written.
The experience of the world shows that multiple languages in a country make disunity of the country more likely.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger in The Disuniting of America writes: “What happens when people of different ethnic origins, speaking different languages and professing different religions, settle in the same geographical locality and live under the same political sovereignty? Unless a common purpose binds them together, tribal antagonisms will drive them apart. In the century darkly ahead, civilization faces a critical question: What is it that holds a nation together?”