Silicon Valley software entrepreneur Ron Unz is leading a campaign in California to gather 433,000 signatures to put an “English for the Children” initiative on next June’s ballot. If successful, the measure would effectively end bilingual education in the nation’s largest and most polyglot state.

Unz’s effort is worth watching because that state’s high level of immigration and ethnic diversity makes it a bellwether in the cultural battles over the nation’s future.

Since 1986, in a series of referendums that have drawn national attention, Californians have voted to make English their official language, to bar illegal immigrants from state services and to abolish racial quotas in state government hiring, contracting and university admissions.

If the bilingual initiative passes, all public-school instruction in California would be in English. Students with limited proficiency would be placed in a special English immersion program, a technique that has proven effective.

Students in bilingual programs — in which instruction is centered in the student’s native language — often fail to learn English well enough to advance far academically. Yet the troubled program persists: Sometimes even English-speaking students with Spanish surnames are forced into the classes — usually against their parents’ wishes.

Unz is working hard to deflect accusations that English for the Children is anti-immigrant. He cites his high-profile opposition to Proposition 187, the 1994 measure that sought to deny public assistance to illegal aliens. He has vowed that no one active on behalf of that popular measure will be permitted to take part in his campaign.

That hasn’t stopped some immigrant political activists from attacking his initiative, sometimes in strident terms. They tend to view bilingualism as a way to maintain and assert their own cultures and as a barrier to kind of assimilation into the American mainstream that Unz wants to promote.

In one noteworthy retort, Leland Yee, a Chinese-American San Francisco city supervisor (councilman), told Unz that the entry of more and more immigrants should compel “non-immigrants” (i.e., native-born Americans) to become bilingual in order to function.

We believe Unz’s initiative is important: If the United States is to survive and prosper as a unified society, new immigrants, and particularly their children, will have to learn English. (Which is not to say, of course, that English speakers should not learn other languages.) Unz’s ballot measure, by requiring English in all the schools, will primarily benefit new immigrants: It is their future that will be circumscribed if they don’t acquire fluency.

But the resistance this common-sense measure is encountering is a sign that the struggle for assimilation may be much tougher than it was during the immigration waves earlier in the century.



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