English-Only Rules Are Un-American

In a display of political ignorance that would be laughable were it not so mean-spirited, the Ventura County farming town of Fillmore decided recently that English is its official language. The city council so declared in a one-sentence resolution that will have no effect other than to insult the half of Fillmore’s 10,000 residents who are Latino.

Council members said that they took the action in response to a petition from Anglo parents in town who were upset because an increase in the number of Latino students in local schools has resulted in some Anglo children being put into bilingual-education programs. These parents, one councilman said, sought to “vent their frustration” by demanding an English-is-official resolution.

Fillmore now stands as a close contender with Huntington Park in the contest for official bungling of the misunderstandings that occur occasionally in multicultural communities. Last year, when some Municipal Court clerks there complained that Latinas on the staff were gossiping among themselves in Spanish, three of the court’s judges issued a ruling prohibiting employees from speaking in any language other than English on the job. The Latina clerks complained, and the three judges stubbornly resisted a year-long campaign by labor unions and Los Angeles County officials to persuade them to modify the ruling.

It finally fell to a federal judge to overturn the edict last month, saying, “The fact that this case has come this far without being resolved is rather vivid testimony that black robes do not by themselves bestow wisdom upon those who wear them.”

These two instances of official mischief should give pause to Assemblyman Frank Hill (R-Whittier), who wants the California Legislature to pass a bill saying that English is the state’s official language.

Proponents of the movement to make English the official language of this country, including those who want to amend the Constitution in the belief that this will strengthen the role that English has played as a unifying force in American life, might ponder whether their effort isn’t really dividing the nation. They also might ponder what the exclusion of all other languages from public discourse would do to this nation’s economic fabric.

I find their movement, and English-only rules, downright un-American.

Fear of immigrants and foreigners has frequently put this country on the edge of xenophobia, and it has been on the upswing ever since the Nixon Administration got carried away with a campaign to stem the flow of illegal migrants from Mexico in the 1970s. Through propaganda put out by officials like former immigration commissioner Leonard Chapman, many citizens got the impression that their country was being overrun by a “silent invasion of illegal aliens”--to use Chapman’s favorite phrase.

Chapman stirred nativist tendencies and hostility toward Mexicans that has not subsided. In fact, it has broadened with the arrival of large numbers of other foreigners on the immigrant tide--particularly the surge of Cuban refugees during the Mariel boatlift and the continuing influx of refugees from Southeast Asia.

I suspect that the frustration and anger felt in this country in the aftermath of defeat in Vietnam, and fears of being drawn into a war in Central America, have fed feelings of bitterness toward foreigners. So has the turmoil that the nation has undergone in trying to meet the challenge of foreign economic competition.

Whatever the reasons, Americans are clearly not feeling very charitable toward foreigners these days. Their hostility can be heard in the often-harsh debate over immigration reform in Congress, where most of the reforms being discussed are restrictionist in nature. And it is reflected in the efforts to make English the constitutionally official language.

Proponents of these measures forget that the use of languages other than English is fed by capitalism, the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

There are so many Spanish-speaking children in Fillmore’s schools because their parents provide the labor that keeps the area’s farms and orchards profitable. Most of those Latino workers want bilingual education for their children so that they have a command of English, the language of power and wealth in this country.

By the same token, Spanish coexists with English in places like California because people can make money--sometimes a lot of it--selling products to people who happen to be more comfortable in that language.

Big business found big money in going bilingual years ago, which is why you can find everything from baseball to Big Macs being sold in Spanish these days.

English-only rules--be they the work of small-time judges, small-town councils or small-minded legislators--are not going to stand in the way of that.