Say Anything Blog

We rubes quit worrying about the illegal immigrants learning English, sayeth the Messiah.  Instead, we should be worrying about when our children are going to learn Spanish.

You know, I don’t understand when people are going around worrying about, “We need to have English- only.” They want to pass a law, “We want English-only.”

Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this. Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.

You know, it’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and all we can say [is], “Merci beaucoup.” Right?

You know, no, I’m serious about this. We should understand that our young people, if you have a foreign language, that is a powerful tool to get a job. You are so much more employable.

Now I’m not going to argue against bilingualism.  I don’t know how powerful a tool it is for getting a job, certainly having a second language isn’t all that important where I’m from but North Dakota isn’t New York or LA either, but I think it’s a good thing.  It expands knowledge and understanding of other cultures and that is important.

But bilingualism isn’t the issue when it comes to English-only policy.  Nobody is demanding that Spanish and French and German not be taught in our schools.  What is being demanded is that the taxpayers not be forced to pay for the translation of government documents and signs and such into other languages to cater to people who come to this country - most of them illegally - and don’t even have enough respect for our society to learn our language.

A lot of Americans are tired of paying for such things.  They’re tired of the idea that our country has to cater to people who don’t respect it.  That’s not how it works.  Most of us wouldn’t move to France, refuse to learn French, and then expect the French government to cater to us with translated forms and road signs.  It’s unreasonable.  If you want to live in France you learn French.  If you want to live in America you learn English.

Also, Germans and Frenchies and other Europeans are bilingual because their continent is roughly the size of our country, and their countries are roughly the size of our states, and so there’s a lot more cultural intermingling going on over there.  They’re bilingual because of the environment they live in, not because they’re smarter than us as Obama implies.