As the nation faces a new administration and the always wondrous possibility of rebirth, most Americans are wholly unaware of one of the most important issues facing us. How many realize that, with a stroke of the pen, the president has officially declared the United States a multilingual state?

One’s first response is surely, “No, that can’t be. This is, and always will be, an English-speaking nation.” True, “Official English” laws have been enacted in many states (25 states now have such laws, with others pending), and bilingual education has been proven to be an abysmal failure. But the apparent contradiction between the president’s move and the success of the anti-bilingual fight does not mean the language fight in America is over.

To the contrary, the multicultural and politically correct doctrinaires who want to see this a multilingual country do not care a whit about what really helps children or how their ideas break down the coherence of the country. They have the education doctrine and they have the philosophical “truth,” and they are not to be deterred in their noble quest. (They also have big federal grants, special status in universities, and multicultural and multilingual lobbies.)

What’s more, their ongoing struggle to divide this country by race, by heritage and now by language has just received an incredible and potentially poisonous shot in the arm from “our” man in the White House.

On Aug. 11, 2000, with as little public ado as when Congress blithely passed the transformational Immigration Act of 1965, President Clinton quietly signed equally “innocent” Executive Order 13166. At the time, I saw one brief newspaper article concerning it. But, while sounding so progressive, the order turned out to be a Trojan horse rolled into the citadel of American society.

Actually, the order, which came after decades of court struggles, was quite clear in its intentions. It required all federal programs using federal funds to guarantee that “language barriers” do not “exclude” non-English speakers from “participation” in all “benefits and services.” Moreover, it applies not only to Spanish, clearly the most prevalent “foreign” language in America, but to every most obscure language where sufficient numbers of immigrants, living here legally or illegally, could petition the government.

John Fonte, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, interpreted what is happening to us in a brilliant piece, published in a recent special issue on immigration in American Enterprise magazine. “Now,” he writes, “foreign language ‘rights’ are, as of this August, included as official ‘civil rights’ in U.S. law.” Failure to comply on language with this legally inventive new order, the Justice Department says, will incredibly be considered the equal of “invidious discrimination on the basis of national origin and race.”

“This notion of a ‘civil right’ to use a foreign language in all federally funded activities,” he writes, “has been established with little or no resistance from either the current Congress or opposition candidates.”

Sums up K.C. McAlpin, head of ProEnglish, a national organization advocating official English, “It is basically a decree that government become a multilingual service provider on demand. It says that the U.S. should become a Tower of Babel.”

Perhaps oddest of all about the Clinton executive order is that, under the fervently politically correct “guidance” of Bill Lann Lee, the acting attorney general for civil rights, this ruling was based on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Through this act, the government is now officially equating the official citizenship requirement that immigrants learn and speak English with the idea that such expectations are as virulent as racial discrimination.

Once again, multicultural leftists in the universities and in the legal and civil rights sectors of government have built on a number of earlier laws and then case studies (in particular, the Martha Sandoval case in Alabama, where a judge ruled that tests for drivers’ licenses should be given in various languages) to construct new legalities totally divorced from the laws’ or cases’ original intent.

Once again, too, we are seeing a situation with all-too-apt parallels to the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which opened the floodgates to Third World immigration and which has immeasurably weakened the civic unity of America (after the act’s backers devoutly promised it would never do so).

This related linguistic case study, threatening to further weaken the citizenship bond, is particularly curious in that it comes so soon after the extraordinary success of the vote to end bilingual education in California through Proposition 227 two years ago.

Educators predicted catastrophe if the modish (and abundantly federally funded) programs were rescinded, but the undeniable fact is that Hispanic students are thriving under the new “English immersion,” and their parents enthusiastically endorse it.

The doctrinaire theorists are not deterred by such irksome realities or by proof. After all, they do not die by their theories; the next generation does. Still, the fog is clearing on many citizenship and immigration issues, even as the din of the Tower of Babel is becoming louder.

Georgie Anne Geyer is a nationally syndicated columnist.



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