Are we back to this?

English-only laws have come into vogue at various points during our history. If you read Levine's book The Opening of the American Mind, you'll see that Americans were threatened at various points by Germans, Swedes, Italians, etc. We've managed to survive all of and still come out with English as the predominant language in our culture.

President Bush apparently supports an "English Plus" theory where it's a good thing to be bilingual. What are we teaching our children and our new immigrants by passing an "English as official language" law as part of the new immigration bill? We're teaching them that heritage speakers of languages don't matter to us. Learn English or you can't be American. And by the way, there's something suspicious about you bilingual Americans too.

If we going to "win" the war on terror, compete in a global economy where China and India are our biggest trade partners, and build bridges in the world, we're going to need to learn other languages. And the best resource we have in America is our legions of immigrants who speak their native language. If we encourage them to teach their children the language, we will have an entire generation of bilingual children in Farsi, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, etc, etc, etc. And those children can in turn become teachers in our nations classrooms to pass their knowledge on. We can be a multi-lingual culture, but talk of English as an official language sends the wrong message. Symbolically and substantially.