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Many illegal immigration advocates do so. They shrug when confronted with someone who has lived in the US for decades and still does not speak English. They then turn around and demand that Americans learn Spanish. I've heard it time and again.
Well then I guess we can agree that those people are being hypocritical and move on.
My daughter's elementary school requires her to learn Spanish. It is very annoying. No other languages are offered. I find that somewhat offensive. Why aren't kids being given the option to study Italian or French or Russian or Hebrew?
because schools are under financial constraints. How many Hebrew speakers do you know? Now out of them how many are certified elementary teachers? I would guess none. It would be exorbitantly expensive to hire one. It would be nice to be inundated with a wide variety of languages though, but that would require native speakers continuing to speak their language in the US in order to maintain fluency.
just because I'm an American citizen does mean we have the same culture..I'm sure its not..My culture is probably not the same as yours...if you came to our house..are you going to learn spanish since your are entering our culture.
Right here is the crux of the matter. Well, two cruxes.
The first is that quite a few people view 'our house' as the country as a whole.
The second is that, with sufficient numbers, your culture (assuming it's Mexican or Central American and given the current trends) looks on line to become 'the' culture, at least in a pretty big tract of the US. I'm afraid that it sounds culturally prejudiced (it is) but there's no great need within the currently dominant culture to produce an endless string of towns like Salinas CA, Maryvale AZ, etc.
Common sense should tell everyone that a high enough rate of immigration, legal or illegal, from the same place will result in those people re-creating where they are from. That really is the central issue.
Personally, I'm not sure that the US (or maybe the West generally) has enough cultural oomph left in it to retain anything like it's current coherence. A future historian will look back on this as interesting days.
As a side note, in terms of official language, probably your safest bet is to view the language of government as the official language. It's really next to impossible to write law, meaning the very same thing, in multiple languages (I can't imagine how the EU even begins to deal with the subtleties of this). When government documents begin to devolve into a multilingual stew, that's when the concept of official language really is eroding.
Have you ever been to a city with a Chinatown? Did it make your culture worse?
There aren't Chinatowns all over the country and in every neighborhood. I don't think anyone objects to ethnic business neighborhoods. It is when your entire country is being transformed to a country like Mexico where the objection lays.
Have you ever been to a city with a Chinatown? Did it make your culture worse?
That's actually an excellent comparison in a lot of ways. Obviously there was a similar hullaballoo concerning the Chinese in the last century. A fairly large group of people move to the US and self-ghettoized, in many cases never really assimilating at all.
I can't say that it's a particularly good thing. You end up with a reservation, with many of it's own laws and it's own language, plonked down in the middle of a US city. It's a form of colony really. The end game is Yugoslavia.
That really is the main issue with Latinos, there's no ocean between Mexico and the US. The sheer numbers involved will obviously lead to a different conclusion than Chinese immigration. Imagine what would happen if we had an open border policy with Asia, even with their new-found successes. You wouldn't have Chinatown, you'd have Chinastate.
It's a form of cultural evolution really. If your own culture simply doesn't feel the will to live anymore, then it's resources will be co-opted by another. My guess is that the Swiss will exist as a people long after the history of the US becomes a trivia question.
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