A few weeks ago, Mr. and Mrs. SC were at the local Ruby's (a largely Southwestern chain of '50s-style diners), and were served by a waiter who was clearly an immigrant from Central or South America. The restaurant is not Mexican-themed in any way, and the usual presumption is that one can expect to conduct transactions there entirely in English.
Thus, we were surprised when the waiter said, "What can I get for you, señores?". To be perfectly honest, SC found this a little off-putting; if he wanted to be addressed this way, he'd go pay a visit to nearby Don José. Recognizing, however, that the waiter was making a serious effort to be gainfully employed, it didn't seem to be occasion for criticism.
Today, your host saw a story which caused him to revisit this issue. Maryland governor Bob Ehrlich is in the midst of a controversy regarding comments he made last week, defending another state official who had expressed anger at McDonald's for allowing workers to address customers in Spanish:
"I reject the idea of multiculturalism. Once you get into this multicultural crap, this bunk, you run into a problem. With respect to this culture, English is the language."
This goes to the heart of a very controversial issue, namely how we assimilate immigrants. It's too big an issue to tackle in one post, because there are so many things to address. Here, we're going to sketch out a few themes that will be occupying this blog over the next month, culminating in an extended review of Samuel Huntington's latest book, Who Are We?.
One of the more obvious themes is the use of language issues for partisan purposes. As the story notes:
In Baltimore, Mayor Martin O'Malley (D) addressed the issue -- in Spanish -- during his weekly radio address, saying, "Few of us would be here if our non-English-speaking relatives hadn't struggled for a few years -- or decades -- to learn English."
This is, to put it mildly, pandering. Which is not to say that SC would recommend that Mayor O'Malley should have done differently; as a political move, it's an increasingly common one. Last September, the Democratic presidential primary included a debate where one segment was conducted in Spanish. George W. Bush is famous, among other things, for having given campaign speeches in Spanish, as well as the first-ever weekly Presidential radio address in Spanish. The Hispanic vote is believed by both sides to be in play, and able to be swung in the direction of either political party. It is significant that both parties' behaviors demonstrate an assumption that Hispanics want to be addressed in Spanish.
Another issue is the question of official language policy, both in the schools and in government. Bilingual education is a topic of considerable controversy in this country, as demonstrated in part by the passage in 1998 of California Proposition 227, a bill intended to shift the focus of bilingual education to getting immigrant children to learn English, and reduce state sponsorship of teaching conducted in non-English languages. This issue is difficult to tease apart from questions of political partisanship; it is not at all uncommon for right-wing opponents of bilingual education to be accused of racism, nor for left-wing proponents to be accused of encouraging separatism. Although we will have much to say on the subject of partisanship in language policy, there's plenty more to discuss regarding the technical merits of bilingual education versus monolingual immersion.
A third theme, one with national security implications, concerns our attitude as a culture towards the integration of immigrants into American society. When this was largely a discussion about how to handle Spanish-speaking immigrants, one's views on the integration issue were largely determined by one's views on the previous two questions. Samuel Huntington has been the object of considerable derision from the linguistic community, particularly Geoff Nunberg, for taking the position that bilingualism is a threat to the continued existence of a shared American culture. In his new book, Who Are We?, Huntington refines this argument into the notion that there exists something we might call the American Creed, a set of values which he attributes to America's heritage as having been founded by Christian Europeans. To some extent, it's unfortunate that Huntington conflates the questions of bilingualism and immigration -- the argument that militant Islamism opposes American civic culture rests on very different facts and beliefs than the argument that bilingualism is a threat to those same values. Your host will be defending the proposition that Huntington is not nearly as far off on bilingualism as Prof. Nunberg thinks (or Mark Liberman), but some of this will have to wait until he gets his copy of the book.
But we'll wrap up for now by returning to Governor Ehrlich's comments, and the question of how one should react to being addressed in Spanish at a place of business which nominally caters to English-speakers. The efforts of some organizations notwithstanding, there is no official language within the U.S., and no laws requiring the speaking of English in restaurants (there are, however, laws mandating English in air traffic control and various hazardous materials situations). In purely ethnic neighborhoods, it's not uncommon for business to be primarily conducted in non-English languages, and we're largely tolerant of that as a society. But there's something of an unstated social contract that this behavior will stay confined to ethnic neighborhoods. It's not clear from the stories in the Washington Post whether or not this occurred in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, although the implication seems to be that it was surprising because it didn't.
SC is reminded of the early growth of a California-based chain of Mexican fast-food restaurants called La Salsa. When they were a small Los Angeles-only chain, it was actually a marketing gimmick of theirs that customers were required to order in Spanish. As they expanded, this policy was dropped in order to appeal to the largest possible customer base. (Your host would provide a link, but a cursory review of the Web suggests that the stories mentioning this are all too old to be available electronically, at least for free.) Similarly, it's not generally the case that one walks into a McDonald's and can't get service in English; to the extent that this becomes a problem, one would expect that managers would reprimand employees and attempt to correct the situation in order to avoid losing sales.
However, we'll also add that this story illustrates the primarily partisan nature of the debate quite nicely. In the Post's original May 8 story, we read that:
Ehrlich said his views on this topic are "very similar" to those of Schaefer (D), the cantankerous former governor who often uses meetings of the Board of Public Works as a public forum to gripe about the daily indignities of life. In this case, that meant sounding off about not being able to communicate with a Spanish-speaking McDonald's employee as he tried to buy a breakfast sandwich."I don't want to adjust to another language," Schaefer, 82, said Wednesday. "This is the United States. I think they ought to adjust to us."
Perhaps because of his age or his penchant for grumbling, Schaefer's comments did not raise the same level of ire as did those made by Ehrlich a day later.
"You've heard my views, and they're very similar to the comptroller's," Ehrlich said.
The governor's comments entered the political arena with lightning speed. Hispanic leaders called the remarks divisive, destructive and shocking.
As can be seen later in the article, Democrats line up to denounce the governor, but not the comptroller, suggesting that their outrage is largely for partisan purposes. Similarly, Republicans quoted in the article -- including Hispanic Republicans -- line up to explain it away by saying that he didn't mean to endorse assimilation, which he plainly did. Again, it's as much about partisanship as serious disagreement over language policy. It's hard to have an objective discussion of this topic, but SC's certainly going to try.
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