More Californians Renouncing English at Home

Today's Los Angeles Times reports on data from the Census Bureau indicating that 43 percent of those in California, and 53 percent in Los Angeles County, speak a language other than English at home:

Bienvenidos. Huan ying. Dobro pozhalovat.

In California, "welcome" is more of an international affair than ever -- with nearly 43% of residents speaking a language other than English at home, according to data released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau. The trend was even more pronounced in Los Angeles, where more than 53% of residents speak another language at home.

Spanish is by far the most common, but Californians also converse in Korean, Thai, Russian, Hmong, Armenian and dozens of other languages.

The census numbers are likely to fuel a decades-long debate in California over immigrants continuing to use their native tongue. There have been battles over bilingual education, foreign-language ballots and English-only restrictions on business signs.

While immigration is the driving force for the state's linguistic diversity, experts said people often speak another language out of choice rather than necessity.

Some do so to get ahead professionally, while others want to maintain connections with their homelands.

The article provides this interesting example of the trend:

Yadira Quezada, 30, speaks mostly English at work, where she coordinates an after-school program for elementary students in Los Angeles.

But at home, she speaks only Spanish. She and her husband are fluent in English, but they don't want their four sons to lose their Spanish or to sound like "gringos" when they speak it.

There may be advantages to such practices, although the article notes unfavorable trends associated with insufficient language assimilation:

The downside is that many people who speak other languages at home are not proficient in English -- making them more likely to earn low wages and live in poor neighborhoods....

Among people living below the poverty line, 56% speak a language other than English in the home, compared with 41% for those above the poverty line, according to the census report.

"Isolation is problematic," said Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, chairman of UCLA's Department of Asian American Studies. "While it reflects the strong ties to the home country, it also suggests that folks in this situation are inherently more cut off from society and less able to participate and take advantage of opportunities here."

And the isolation is also felt by some English speakers living in areas where foreign languages are prevalent. Dental office administrator Mia Bonavita, 39, recently moved from San Diego to Monterey Park, where business at many stores is done in Chinese. Bonavita says the language barrier is difficult.

"I feel like an outsider," she said. "It's difficult to get to know your neighbors."

The linguistic diversity also affects the schools, where educators struggle to meet students' needs.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, there are more than 265,000 English learners who speak 91 languages. The district has a special translation unit, but must rely on parents and community members for some languages.

Southern California has numerous ethnic enclaves where speaking English is not a necessity, including parts of the San Gabriel Valley, Little Saigon, East L.A. and Koreatown. And some residents there say the lack of English hasn't diminished their lives.

I've written much on immigration issues and cultural assimilation.

My main concerns - amid our recent national immigration debate - have focused on illegal immigration (border lawlessness and the entitlement culture of immigrant rights activists) and threats from multiculturalism to the maintenance of a common national identity.

On the latter, I agree with Samuel Huntington, when he writes about the "Hispanic challenge":

The extent and nature of this [late-20th century] immigration differ fundamentally from those of previous immigration, and the assimilation successes of the past are unlikely to be duplicated with the contemporary flood of immigrants from Latin America. This reality poses a fundamental question: Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture? By ignoring this question, Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish).

I have tremendous respect for ethnic diveristy (and I live it daily in my classrooms and neighborhoods).

Yet, I remain convinced - like Huntington - that America's many strengths are rooted in the nation's Anglo-Protestant cultural heritage. That heritage is a powerful glue binding our disparate ethnic enclaves into one society, but at some point a fabric frays, and the binds that hold together may fail.

Teaching Struggling Students

Thomas Curwen of the Los Angeles Times discusses the everyday hardships of students, and the difficulties such problems present for life inside the classroom:

A friend sent me an e-mail the other day. He teaches third grade at a public school in San Bernardino County, and as he was getting ready for the start of a new year, he found tucked into a folder a note that he had scribbled to himself in the middle of a previous school year.

The words were inspired by one of the more mundane bits of class management, but as he began the work, the reality of the task began to sink in.

"Here I am -- another month of teaching gone by -- contemplating our school's monthly awards: Perfect Attendance, Outstanding Citizen, Outstanding Scholar, Superior Writer, Great Reader. . . [and] all I can think of is: How about an award for Psychological Survivor, Emotional Duress Survivor? In other words, awards for just coping with life."

When my friend wrote his note, he was teaching a class of 30 fifth-graders, and it was easy for the lives of the students, whom he had slowly gotten to know, to overshadow any consideration of monthly achievement. Here are a few of his descriptions:

* A girl who was once locked in a dark closet for eight hours by a baby sitter. The child talked longingly of her dad, who was in prison;

* A girl who was sexually abused at a very young age and taught to steal money from purses at age 2;

* A girl still coping with her grandmother's near-fatal car accident. She brought in newspaper clippings of the accident along with some shaved hair from her grandmother...

Here - and elsewhere, in classrooms across America - some form of psychological trauma in children's lives trumps whatever cards educators and politicians are trying to play. Some of the trauma is the result of poverty, to be sure. In my friend's district, for instance, three-quarters of the students receive free or reduced-price lunches, and in his note he described gang stories and tales of parental drug abuse and violence.

But poverty is only part of the problem, which is really more about the complicated existences that all children lead. So why do politicians and school boards spend so much time discussing budgets and testing and oversight and accountability?

No doubt they are easier to talk about than the emotional lives of children who are often left to struggle by themselves (or, if they are lucky, with a teacher) through matters of grief, abuse, divorce and special needs. It's no wonder then that so many teachers feel that what they are up against on a daily basis is often ignored.

I would bet that the great majority of teachers - with the exception, perhaps, of those teaching in the most affluent, advantaged neighborhoods - would be able to share similar stories of students' personal hardships and educational challenges.

As a teacher of many students from very diverse and underprivileged backgrounds, I've had students time and again who had been victims of domestic violence, who were recovering from stroke or other debilitating diseases, who had been on welfare with multiple kids and inadequate child care, or those who had tragically lost loved ones to murderous violence in the inner city.

Situations like these are not infrequent, and they make the teaching life stimulating and rewarding, especially when one is able to make a real difference in the life-chances of students.

One thing I noticed about the Curwen article is his reporting avoids pleas for extenuating treatment. Student confessions of hardship are often accompanied by appeals to sympathy. But educational standards must never erode in the face of ever-growing student struggles - in my opinion, at least.

Teachers should make every effort to treat students equally and maintain a rigorous curriculum. Helping students succeed despite their troubles should be paramount. Publicizing and attempting to make available student success resources at the school can help, but in the end, some kids may not be as successful as they might, at least until they can change the life circumstances that make schooling a hard knocks enterprise for them.

Importing Poverty: Immigration and the Poor

Robert Samuelson's one of those rare journalists who regularly cuts through all the baloney on any number of policy areas. His tightly-reasoned article today on immigration and poverty is an excellent example:

The government last week released its annual statistical report on poverty and household income. As usual, we - meaning the public, the media and politicians - missed a big part of the story. It is this: The stubborn persistence of poverty, at least as measured by the government, is increasingly a problem associated with immigration. As more poor Hispanics enter the country, poverty goes up. This is not complicated, but it is widely ignored.

The standard story is that poverty is stuck; superficially, the statistics support that. The poverty rate measures the share of Americans below the official poverty line, which in 2006 was $20,614 for a four-person household. Last year, the poverty rate was 12.3 percent, down slightly from 12.6 percent in 2005 but higher than the recent low, 11.3 percent in 2000. It was also higher than the 11.8 percent average for the 1970s. So the conventional wisdom seems amply corroborated.

It isn't. Look again at the numbers. In 2006, there were 36.5 million people in poverty. That's the figure that translates into the 12.3 percent poverty rate. In 1990, the population was smaller, and there were 33.6 million people in poverty, a rate of 13.5 percent. The increase from 1990 to 2006 was 2.9 million people (36.5 million minus 33.6 million). Hispanics accounted for all of the gain.

Consider: From 1990 to 2006, the number of poor Hispanics increased 3.2 million, from 6 million to 9.2 million. Meanwhile, the number of non-Hispanic whites in poverty fell from 16.6 million (poverty rate: 8.8 percent) in 1990 to 16 million (8.2 percent) in 2006. Among blacks, there was a decline from 9.8 million in 1990 (poverty rate: 31.9 percent) to 9 million (24.3 percent) in 2006. White and black poverty has risen somewhat since 2000 but is down over longer periods.

Only an act of willful denial can separate immigration and poverty. The increase among Hispanics must be concentrated among immigrants, legal and illegal, as well as their American-born children. Yet, this story goes largely untold. Government officials didn't say much about immigration when briefing on the poverty and income reports. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal advocacy group for the poor, both held briefings. Immigration was a common no-show.

Why is it important to get this story straight?

One reason is truthfulness. It's usually held that we've made little, if any, progress against poverty. That's simply untrue. Among non-Hispanic whites, the poverty rate may be approaching some irreducible minimum: people whose personal habits, poor skills, family relations or bad luck condemn them to a marginal existence. Among blacks, the poverty rate remains abysmally high, but it has dropped sharply since the 1980s. Moreover, taking into account federal benefits (food stamps, the earned-income tax credit) that aren't counted as cash income would further reduce reported poverty.

We shouldn't think that our massive efforts to mitigate poverty have had no effect. Immigration hides our grudging progress.

A second reason, notes Samuelson, is because we "import poor people" through our current policies, placing tremendous strain on public schools, social welfare programs, and health care:

We need an immigration policy that makes sense. My oft-stated belief is that legal immigration should favor the high-skilled over the low-skilled. They will assimilate quickest and aid the economy the most. As for present illegal immigrants, we should give most of them legal status, both as a matter of practicality and fairness. Many have been here for years and have American children. At the same time, we should clamp down on new illegal immigration through tougher border controls and employer sanctions.

Sounds good to me - I've been arguing this basic point in many of my posts on immigration (here and here).