I'm annoyed by people who come to the United States and refuse to learn English; I am also annoyed by the extent to which some authorities, including the government, go to enable these people to get along without learning English.  I am so outspoken on the subject that a friend gave me a T-shirt that reads, "Welcome to America.  Now speak English!"  I dare not wear it in public, however, for fear of being arrested for violating some Law of Political Correctness.

The reason often given for not insisting on a command of English in this predominantly English-speaking country is something called "diversity."   In its extreme form, the doctrine of diversity says that any emphasis given to the culture or language of the majority represents, ipso facto, discrimination against any other culture or language.

This argument says that, if we allow any language or culture to become dominant, we deny others the right to preserve their own language or culture.  This is utter nonsense.  For generations, immigrants came to this country and were assimilated into the culture that existed here.  Expecting to reap the benefits of living in America – and usually reaping many of these benefits – they recognized the necessity of adapting to their new home.  This did not mean that they had to abandon their customs, culture, and language altogether – only that they had to adapt.  It was a trade-off they willingly made.  In private and among themselves, they preserved their own culture.  In fact, certain aspects of their culture appealed to the natives and were adopted as part of the mainstream.  That is, in part, how English came to contain many words of foreign origin.

This no longer appears to be the case.  Rather than adapt so as to be assimilated, newcomers to this country expect the society to adapt to them.  The cliché about having one's cake and eating it too comes to mind.  You don't leave your country to seek a better life in another country and then expect the people in that country to change to suit you.  You have the right to preserve your own culture if that is important to your happiness (a right established by the English-speaking founders of the country in a document written in English), but you have the responsibility to adapt in your public life.

It is in the best interests of immigrants to do so, anyway.  The experiment with bilingualism in California some years ago is instructive.  Given the large numbers of Spanish-speaking citizens in the state, California tried to implement a bilingual system of education.  The experiment was aborted, partly because Hispanics themselves felt that, if their children were not well educated in English, they would be at a disadvantage in America.  This amounts to a tacit admission that a lack of fluency in English in a predominantly English-speaking country is a liability.  As the kids would say, "Well, duh!"

As the California experience illustrates, the school system plays a critical role here.  It is, after all, in the schools that the children of immigrants will learn to adapt by learning English or will be permitted to muddle through without learning it.  I teach English Composition at the college level, and the class includes an essay at the end of the semester that is scored by the department.  Although we have special ESL courses for non-native speakers, the regular classes always contain some foreign students.  Often, their essays contain the types of errors that are commonly made by non-native speakers –difficulty with articles, prepositions, and idioms, for example.  We always have a debate about whether we should hold these identifiable non-native speakers to the same standards as native-born speakers, even though the purpose of the departmental essay is to ensure that students who take the course achieve certain minimal standards of English fluency.  While I think that it is fair to make allowances for those types of idiomatic errors that are peculiar to non-native speakers, I feel that they should otherwise be held to the same standards of English as the native speakers are.  Giving a passing grade to an incoherent paper because it was written by a non-native speaker is a kind of entitlement and is reverse discrimination.

Society works best when people have certain common standards.  The miracle of American society is that it permits a wide range of individual choices – allows for true diversity of thought – while preserving a basic commonality.  But choice has consequences.  As matters now stand, immigrants are free to choose not to learn English, but they should be prepared to accept the consequences of this choice.  They should not expect society to adapt to their willful choices by granting them entitlements or special considerations.  In my opinion, we already go more than far enough, and probably too far, by providing dual language versions of government forms and other vital documents.  Good grief!  We even issue instructions for jury duty in two languages.  Should someone who is unable to understand English be considered as a possible juror when the testimony in most court cases is given in English?

I should, I suppose, be sympathetic when I see and hear a non-English-speaking person struggling to understand and be understood in a public setting where only English is spoken.  However, most of the time I am not.  Recently, I stood in line behind such a person at the prescription counter in a pharmacy.  The pharmacist was trying to explain some issue involving Medicare coverage, and the person obviously did not understand what was being said, nor could she make her questions understood by the pharmacist.  It wasn't a very complicated matter, but the language barrier made communication impossible.  Yet the non-English-speaker had obviously been in the country long enough to qualify for Medicare.  Why hadn't she learned enough English to cope with the situation?

Those who oppose "imposing" the English language upon non-native speakers who come to live in this country mount the high horses of promoting "diversity" and recognizing "muliculturalism."  They speak of "the tyranny of the majority" and "the myth of a core culture."  They oppose adopting English officially as our nation's language.  In time, they may succeed in arguing that the country should have no common culture at all but just be a federation of clans. Oblivious to any national culture and lacking a dominant language, we shall have nothing in common except that we live within certain geographical boundaries.