Yahoo.com featured a Reuters article Wednesday that many Americans will likely find relieving: "Immigration no threat to English use in U.S. study."
Americans worried about a cultural takeover by phantom brown people need not worry: They and their children will continue to speak English for generations to come.
The study indicated that by the second or third generation, descendants of immigrants are usually "linguistically dead" and can only communicate in English. It's a sad testament to how paranoid and intolerant this country is when we need sociologists to tell us something that should be plainly obvious.
I greet people with "Hello, how are you?" not "Dia dhuit, conas ta tu?" I should note that I had to look in a book to figure out how to say that in Irish, the language of my immigrant ancestors. Likewise, most Italian-Americans don't speak Italian. Despite Indiana's large German-American population, most Hoosiers don't speak German.
What has historically happened in this country is that immigrant communities learned English, but the languages of their ancestors influenced local dialects. Good examples include the Scandinavian-influenced dialects of the upper Midwest and Seattle's Ballard district.
In all probability, a large influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the Southwest and California will probably cause local accents to change somewhat and add Spanish words to everyday vocabulary.
But the issue here isn't language - it's fear of the "other." People often fear the "other" and the threat that it supposedly poses to our comfortable existence.
On Sept. 10, the New York Times reported that people in the northern Russian city of Kondopoga, near the border with Finland, accused migrants from the Caucasus region of price gouging potatoes. In the wake of angry protests that turned into a riot in which businesses owned by Chechen and Azeri migrants were burned, nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky said in a radio interview that ownership of small businesses should be restricted to local residents.
People who speak different languages, have different customs and practice different religions have long been a source of fear in the US.
In the 1800s, it was Irish, Jewish, Italian, Polish, Chinese and Japanese immigrants who threatened America. Today, it's Mexicans and other Latin Americans.
Where one Russian woman interviewed for the Times article, she said "[Chechens and Azeris] do not even work. They just speculate - Ours are unemployed," Mexican immigrants to the US are accused of taking all the jobs, even as the Department of Commerce reported Sept. 14 that jobless claims had dropped in the past week.
Sept. 15, HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" featured an interview with Pat Buchanan, who was discussing his new book, "State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America." Buchanan basically said the reason why so many Mexicans immigrate to the US illegally was because Mexico was trying to gain a political foothold in the US.
Ironically, in the 1800s, many white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans would have said the same about Buchanan's Irish-Catholic ancestors, whom many native-born Americans believed were part of a Vatican conspiracy to take over the US. Many Protestant Americans even questioned Kennedy's fitness to be president because they feared he would be more loyal to the Vatican than the US.
It's no more possible for Mexicans to return the Southwest to Mexico than it is for San Francisco's Chinatown to become a Chinese province. But too many Americans are willing to believe that the "other" poses a threat to our very security and safety.
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