Steve Benen points to the latest immigrant-baiting legislation from Iowa Rep. Steve King and Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe are pushing, a bill that would require " all official United States government functions be conducted in English."
I think there may be some equal-protection problems with such a bill, but as policy, it's another example of the intersection between mean-spiritedness and uselessness. Despite the restrictionist myth that Latino immigrants are somehow resistant to learning English, as the Center for American Progress pointed out in a study in immigrant assimilation, virtually all second-generation immigrants are proficient in English:
The Park-Myers findings for second-generation Latino Americans indicate even greater increase in high school completion (84 percent) than reported in the current study for Latino immigrants who arrived at young ages. The second-generation status attainments are estimated at the age of 35, including the following additional outcomes: B.A. degree (21 percent), higher-paying occupation (32 percent), living in households above the poverty line (92 percent), and homeownership (71 percent).
Meanwhile, virtually 100 percent of the second-generation Latino Americans have mastered the English language, thus overcoming any barriers their parents suffered. On several of these scores this second generation of Latinos converges on the white native born attainment levels at the same age, such as households above the poverty line (just shy of the native-born standard of 93 percent), homeownership (71 percent vs. 79 percent for native-born) and higher occupation (32 percent vs. 40 percent).
The crisis this bill is intended to address doesn't really exist, at least not if we're talking about English-language proficiency. If, on the other hand, you're trying to make the country as inhospitable as possible to immigrants, then the bill doesn't seem like such a weird idea.
