Delagar replies to my earlier post on fears that mexican immigrants are uniquely resistant to English:
I teach History of the English Language, so I know a bit about this...there weren't DVDs, but there were plays, there were music hall shows, there was an entire publishing industry putting out books and magazines in Yiddish or German or Greek or whatever, there was bilingual education -- whole school districts taught in German or in Scandinavian or Greek whatever language was dominant in the area, because, guess why, that's who was paying the taxes, and because, guess why, children learned better that way (have a look at Amish schools today) -- and, guess what, the second generation of immigrant children still learned English, still assimilated. It wasn't until around WWI and then the Russian Revolution (with the influx of those Socialists and their scary notions) that good white Americans started fretting about what those foreign folks might be saying in those languages "we" couldn't understand.
