Fear that Immigrants Won't Learn English Nothing New

Last month, many Americans criticized the release of a Spanish version of the National Anthem, suggesting that the song was just another reminder of how America was losing its English-language heritage. Such fear is nothing new. In the outstanding book, The First American, H.W. Brands discusses how Benjamin Franklin worried about that very issue in the mid 1700s. The following passage (written by Benjamin Franklin concerning German immigrants) is particularly illuminating.

Few of their children in the country learn English; they import many books from Germany. The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German. They begin of late to make all of their bonds and legal writings in their own language which (though I think not ought to be) are allowed good in our courts, where the German business so increases that there is continual need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half our legislators what the other half say.

One would hope that 250 years after Benjamin Franklin’s comments, we would have learned that it takes time for a new immigrant community to assimilate. Apparently, we have not.


Immigrants, English, Franklin