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If a person chooses not to learn English,
that is his or her right. However the public should not
have to pay for this decision. A year's grace period to
learn our language is acceptable. A year's help with
bi-lingual education is more than enough time. After
that point, those whom choose not to learn English should be
required to pay out of their own pockets for interpreters,
translations, instructors and any other enabling devices.
The money we are spending to enable non-English speaking
people would be better spent protecting our borders,
researching cures for AIDS and cancer and cutting our taxes.
A Solution:
Rather than use our tax dollars to translate
everything for a few languages, put that money into language
emersion and give these people the language skills and
abilities that mean success rather than imprison them in a
world where their lack of understanding condemns them to
government entitlements and a life of abject poverty. Let’s
put this money into allowing the children to spend an
additional year in our school system if the need to in order
to make up for the first year when they arrived. Stop giving
people excuses and start empowering them with ability.
Opportunity, not excuses. Assist, not enable.
Bilingual people have a decided
advantage over monolingual people when it comes to
communication in their native language. By speaking more than
one language, a person’s ability to articulate in both
languages dramatically increases. Turn a phrase in several
alternatives styles, testing through reverse translation to
best give meaning. This one skill has allowed me to succeed
in creative writing and advertising and has been a key to
creating the rhythms my writing is known for.
TOP
Additionally as a society we are passing
up a tremendous learning opportunity by providing bilingual
education in schools and bilingual government services. I
became painfully aware of this after viewing The Killing
Fields. Within our schools when I was a teen we had the
living experiences of one of the most horrendous human
experiences in history. As teens, we knew little about it and
many of our opinions were colored by the anger still fresh in
the minds of our parents whom fought in Viet Nam. So much we
could have learned from these students if we had just been
given the opportunity.
Rather than dumping the Cambodians,
Laotians and Vietnamese into our schools and asking them to
fend for themselves, the district should
have integrated them. Integration would act like an exchange
student program where a student would adopt another student
for the year and help integrate that student into our
culture. This would allow the American student to learn from
the immigrants and in turn help the immigrants learn our
language and customs. This same principle would work with
adults as well. Families could adopt families and include them
in their rituals, entertaining and daily activities. The key
to learning a new language is simple. It’s emersion and
participating in the culture. This is why exchange students
return fluent in their host country language after a six-month
to one-year stay and military children and personnel,
stationed for years often have only a rudimentary
understanding of another language. The exchange students are
immersed in the new language; military people remain in an
English-speaking island within the country. TOP
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Yes, immigrants do require sponsors, but
these sponsors are often from their country or family. What
I’m outlining here would be having a family that has no ties
to the originating country or the ability to speak its
language mentoring a new family or person. By doing this, as a
society we use the power of friendship, curiosity and our
natural affinity to help to integrate non-English speaking
people into our society. Through it we gain lifelong friends,
an understanding of another culture and an immigrant
population positioned to succeed in our society rather than
live off it.
Best of all, this can be done for a
fraction of what we are spending on bilingual education and
translation. The results benefit our entire society rather
than just a few.
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LAURA'S EXPERIENCE | TOP
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