Maybe he should stay home...

Lino Lakes, Minnesota, just voted an English-only ordinance that prohibits the city from translating anything out of English (with a prudent 'let's not lose our federal money' exception for health, public safety, and education). The typical rationale was that it was "budgetary" - its main proponent on the council said "The reality is these are really hard times, economically, for all of us, and it is a budgetary issue." Pointing out that the city is furloughing and laying off, he added, "we're trying to protect the good staff that we have and need." Wow, you may be asking, how much of the budget was consumed by translation services?

None.

Yeah. Lino Lakes has never spent a dime on translation services of any kind. That makes this way less about being "a budgetary issue" and way more about being something else.

What kind of something else? Well, here's what one guy* had to say:

"I'm tired of going to restaurants and hearing these new families speaking their native tongue to their kids."

Okay. I think we can all tell what kind of issue it is for him...

*I know. Someone's going to point out that he adds, "There doesn't seem to be any teaching of English to kids in their families." But that only demonstrates his profound lack of understanding how kids learn a new language. It isn't from having parents who don't speak it well "teach" it to them in restaurants. The kids will learn English, especially if they're put into a good school (though I'm guessing this guy's stand on translation makes that more difficult - and would, if he could do it, make it impossible). And so will their parents, who will - as pointed out in a column ironically running on the same day - try very hard to learn English.

"In loud voices and on the opinion pages of the local paper, residents railed against the newcomers for not learning English. But as I soon found out, they were certainly trying. Every evening, exhausted after a day of work, men and women came to a baby blue schoolhouse in Aberdeen to learn."

There is in fact plenty of evidence that over 80% of immigrants try to learn English formally - in the rapidly disappearing ESL courses offered at nights. In fact, there's plenty of evidence that even illegal immigrants (the sad end of that column was about the school closing because the local fishing plant was raided and people were afraid to come) will work their butts off to learn English. Unfortunately, not only is there a perception that people who are "speaking their native language" are not trying to learn English, but also a very wrong perception out there (as evidenced by a poll in Salt Lake City a few years back) that learning English is easy:

One of the biggest surprises from the survey, community leaders said, is the time employers think it takes to learn English. Almost half of employers said it should take six to 12 months to learn English, the survey said.

Combining those two perceptions leads to this: anybody who speaks their native tongue to their children is a lazy parasite who just wants to sponge off the rest of us.

And one more thing: regardless of what he thinks, his grandparents almost certainly didn't stop speaking Swedish to each other once they came to the US... though quite clearly he (like most immigrants' children) doesn't know any of their language. That's the way it works. Most people whose parents were European immigrants, or who grew up in Littly Italy or Poland know this - and grew up speaking English even where their parents never mastered it. And people like him won't stop it or speed it up. All they'll do is make their city a deeply unwelcoming place.

Addendum: In the workshop I'm taking, a woman just said that her students are heritage speakers of Chinese, teenagers who ... don't want to be there because they don't want to study Chinese, don't use it among themselves, and only speak it when their parents make them.