Page images
PDF
EPUB

FOR HIMSELF THE RIGHT TO INTERPRET EVENTS IN SACREMENTO,
AUSTIN OR WASHINGTON, D. C., FOR AN ENTIRE COMMUNITY.

THERE IS ALSO AN UNDERLYING ASSUMPTION BEHIND THE BI-
LINGUAL BALLOT THAT STRIKES ME AS BIASED, EVEN UNCONCIOUSLY
RACIST. THE FIVE PERCENT "TRIGGER" FOR BILINGUAL BALLOTS
IN THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT SEEMS TARGETED STRICTLY AT NON-WHITE
GROUPS. IT RARELY HAS BEEN USED TO MANI ATE SEPARATE BALLOTS
FOR NON-ENGLISH-SPEAKING WHITES, BE THEY SWEDES, GREEKS,
GERMANS OR HASSIDIC JEWS. THE HIDDEN ASSUMPTION HERE IS
THAT, AS SENATOR HAYAKAWA PUTS IT, THAT "LEARNING ENGLISH
IS BEYOND THE CAPACITIES OF NON-WHITE PEOPLE, WHO THEREFORE
NEED BALLOTS IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE, WHILE WHITE PEOPLE, WHETHER
JEWS OR HUNGARIANS OR PORTUGESE OR SWISS, ARE SMART ENOUGH
TO NEED NO SUCH ASSISTANCE."

IN EDUCATION, LANGUAGES OTHER THAN ENGLISH ARE BEING USED TO TEACH MATH, GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY AND OTHER SUBJECTS. As THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL WRITERS RECENTLY OBSERVED, "THE TROUBLE WITH MUCH (OF THE) 'BILINGUAL' EDUCATION IS THAT IT ISN'T BILINGUAL."

A 1976 TEST OF 136 NEW MEXICO TEACHERS IN BILINGUAL PROGRAMS SHOWED THAT ONLY 13 OF THEM LESS THAN 10 PERCENT

[ocr errors]

COULD READ AND WRITE IN SPANISH AT THE THIRD-GRADE LEVEL.
MANY EDUCATION EXPERTS WILL TELL YOU THAT THIS IS INDICATIVE
OF THE LEVEL OF BILINGUAL INSTRUCTION THROUGHOUT THE UNITED
STATES. WE ARE, IN ESSENCE, TEACHING THE 3.6 MILLION
LIMITED-ENGLISH-PROFICIENT STUDENTS IN THIS COUNTRY TO

BE ILLITERATE IN TWO LANGUAGES.

WHILE THERE IS AMPLE EVIDENCE THAT CURRENT SO-CALLED
BILINGUAL EDUCATION IS FAILING, THERE IS ALSO ABUNDANT
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE THAT AN EXPEDITIOUS PROGRAM OF ENGLISH
LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION LEADS TO REMARKABLE PROGRESS.
EXAMPLE, IN MCALLEN, TEXAS, THE SCHOOL DISTRICT

FOR

CONDUCTED

ITS TRANSITORY BILINGUAL PROGRAMS PARTLY IN SPANISH AND
PARTLY ENGLISH. NOW, IN A PILOT PROJECT IN THAT DISTRICT,

YOUNGSTERS WHO ARE IMMERSED IN ENGLISH AFTER A THREE-WEEK
TRANSITION PERIOD ARE DOING MARKEDLY BETTER THAN THEIR

PEERS. AT MCALLEN'S SAM HOUSTON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, YOUNG-
STERS IN FIVE KINDERGARTENS ARE SHOWING GAINS IN ORAL
ENGLISH PROFICIENCY ABOUT A THIRD HIGHER THAN THEIR PEERS
IN TRADITIONAL BILINGUAL PROGRAMS,

IT IS OBVIOUS THAT THESE CHILDREN WANT TO LEARN ENGLISH; THAT THEIR PARENTS WANT THEM TO LEARN ENGLISH, AND THAT THEY WILL NEED ENGLISH TO ADVANCE IN AMERICAN SOCIETY.

MR. CHAIRMAN, WE ARE DECEIVING PARENTS AND CHEATING CHILDREN OF THEIR FUTURE. WHEN WE LULL THEM INTC THINKING THAT ENGLISH ISN'T NECESSARY TO MAKE IT IN AMERICA.

TO CONCLUDE, THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AMENDMENT IS A NECESSARY DESIGNATION OF ONE LANGUAGE AS THE COMMON DENOMINATOR FOR A

COMPLEX AND DIVERSE SOCIETY. THERE IS SOME PRECEDENT FOR THIS. IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES, CONGRESS CONSISTENTLY REFUSED TO PRINT DOCUMENTS IN GERMAN. TO MAINTAIN THESE POLICIES IN THE FUTURE AGAINST MOUNTING POLITICAL PRESSURES, CONGRESS WILL NEED A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

THE AMENDMENT PRE-EMPTS ANY FURTHER ATTEMPTS TO POLITICIZE LANGUAGE. IT WOULD NOT THREATEN THE VENERABLE AMERICAN TRADITION OF POLYCULTURALISM. IRONICALLY, ONLY A COMMON TONGUE CAN

PRESERVE THAT TRADITION.

ONLY A COMMON TONGUE CAN

BIND TOGETHER A NATION MADE UP OF SO MANY LITTLE

NATIONS.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME MR. CHAIRMAN. I HOPE THAT MORE

OF OUR COLLEAGUES WILL TAKE AN INTEREST IN THE MEASURE IN
THE NEAR FUTURE.

Senator HATCH. Our next witness is an internationally-renowned semanticist who first introduced an English language amendment in 1981, whilé serving as the U.S. Senator from the State of Califor'nia, Mr. S.I. "Sam" Hayakawa.

When a major immigration reform bill came before the Senate in 1982, Senator Hayakawa successfully attached to it an amendment declaring the sense of the Senate that English is the official language of the United States. As I understand, that amendment is still part of the immigration bill which the House is now considering.

So we are pleased to welcome the distinguished author, educator, philosopher and former colleague, Senator Sam Hayakawa. We are happy to have you here, Senator.

STATEMENT OF HON. S.I. HAYAKAWA, A FORMER U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

Mr. HAYAKAWA. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

It is a great privilege and pleasure to be here, and I am very happy that this hearing is being held to take this issue one step further in public discussion.

Mr. Chairman, the drive for the constitutional amendment to make English the official language of the United States received a great boost just 2 weeks ago in the State of California. We had an initiative measure going which, if passed, would require the Governor of California to petition the President and the Congress of the United States to relieve the State of California from having to provide ballots and voter information materials in languages other than English.

[ocr errors]

The deadline for turning in the 393,000 signatures necessary to qualify the measure for the November election of 1984 was May 29. On that day, the district chairmen and officers of our organization, Californians for Ballots in English, delivered to the registrars of voters at county seats throughout the State a total of 626,321 signatures, almost twice as many as were needed.

The campaign to gather these signatures was begun in February 1984 so that we had less than 4 months in which to reach our goal. The signatures were collected by mail campaign originally, in which petition forms were sent out along with letters asking for financial contributions to sustain the drive. As money came in, more mailings were sent out.

What was noticeable about the responses to the mailings was, first, what seemed to us to be an extremely large number of small contributions, accompanied in many instances by letters from naturalized immigrant Americans, expressing how much it had meant to them to learn English and become American citizens.

Second, a remarkable number of people made additional copies of their petition forms on copying machines, to take around to their relatives, friends, and their places of work, in order to gather more signatures which they mailed in to us. And, when we got to the stage of stationing workers at shopping centers to collect more signatures, passersby would see the placards saying, "Ballots in English Only," and they stopped to sign the petitions at once without asking any further questions; they just lined up to sign them. The

speed with which we reached our goal indicates the deep desire of people, both old-line Americans and more recent immigrants, to vote in English as an expression of their identity as Americans.

Now, where did the opposition to "Ballots in English Only" come from? Our experience in California has shown that it comes principally from Hispanic spokesmen, although our petition forms against bilingual ballots show thousands and thousands of Hispanic names. Objections also came from one American-born Chinese, who does not read or write Chinese, we learned, and calls himself chairman of "Chinese for Affirmative Action." However, no objections were heard from the Chinese Six Companies, who are the traditional spokesmen for Chinese-American interests in San Francisco.

Speaking of the Chinese, I want to tell a little story about a problem that emerged. In San Francisco, the translation of voter information was entrusted to educated Chinese scholars, who rendered the material into literary Chinese, a classical style which proved to be beyond the comprehension of the average voter. Clearly, what was needed was a translation of the translation, but no one offered to supply such a translation. There certainly has been no demand for bilingual ballots from the Japanese, who today are predominantly English-speaking Nisei and Sansei-that is, the children and grandchildren of the original immigrants.

There are tens of thousands of Koreans in California. Most have come to the United States since World War II. They are so eager to succeed in American terms that they would be the last to ask for ballots in their own language.

The Vietnamese, of whom we have many in California, are so glad to have found refuge in the United States that they, too, make no special demands of our culture, but ask instead what our culture demands of them. What is so admirable and touching about Vietnamese children is the way in which they have excelled in their school work, often being chosen as valedictorians at their high school graduations. Clearly, their parents have brought them up to study hard to become good citizens in the country that rescued them from death when, just a few years ago, they were fleeing from their conquered homeland.

The support of the English language amendment as we have found it is overwhelming. Last November in San Francisco, we had a referendum designated as proposition O, which asked that our mayor request the President and Congress to relieve us of the necessity of voting materials in foreign languages. It carried by almost a two-thirds majority, despite the city's large immigrant population.

I myself sent out a questionaire about the English language amendment late in 1982 to over 1 million of my constituents, that is, people who had written to me while I was in office. The responses to that questionaire resulted in more than a 96-percent vote in favor of such a constitutional amendment. This same questionaire was duplicated by its recipients, again by copying machine, not only in California, but in other States, especially Florida and Texas, as I learned when I started receiving hundreds of responses from outside my own State.

Now, despite the popularity of this issue among the general voting public, it is not quite so popular among those holding elect

ed political office. Hispanic leaders have been especially loud in their demand for bilingual ballots and bilingual education. But it has seemed to me from the results of my own questionaire that Mexican American rank and file as well as other Latin American immigrants are not so different from other immigrants who have come to stay-they want to learn English, and their children to learn English, as quickly as possible in order to enter the mainstream of American life.

The bilingual, or foreign language, ballot, was introduced into American politics in 1975 through an amendment offered to the Voting Rights Act by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas. The amendment was targeted specifically at the MexicanAmerican vote. However, as it was worded, it applied to other language groups, so that it was surprising that there was little or no national debate on this subject. The amendment, having survived a challenge in the House, was included without further debate in the Senate version and became law as part of the Voting Rights Act. It became law largely unnoticed by anybody except its proponents.

It is not unfair to say, then, that the amendment became law without becoming news, so that the general public first learned of its existence in the elections of 1976, when people went to the polls and were offered for the first time ballots in an American election printed in a foreign language. I have been told that on that day, the office of the registrar of voters in San Francisco received telephone calls all day long and all evening, asking why this was so. Today, people in San Francisco have become used to seeing ballots and voter pamphlets in Spanish and Chinese, but many people, including especially naturalized citizens to whom English is not their native tongue, continue to be distressed or angry.

I would like to emphasize that this distress or anger does not arise from ethnic prejudice or hostility. What concerns most people is the open threat that foreign language ballots convey to our cherished idea of "one nation, indivisible.'

Let me add a dimension of meaning to "one Nation, indivisible," by talking a minute or two about Japan. Japan, too, is "one nation, indivisible," but with one important difference. Japan is not only indivisible; it is also impenetrable. You simply have to be Japanese to start with to get anywhere in life. No immigrant or child of immigrants with a name like Hatch, Huddleston, Reagan, Stevens, Carter, or O'Neill, no matter how steeped since infancy in Japanese language and culture, can hope to achieve any position of importance, like police chief or principal of a high school or mayor of a city, to say nothing of being elected to the national diet. The best you can ever do is to become a comedian or a professional ballplayer.

An interesting fact about the impenetrability of Japanese society is that Koreans, who really cannot be distinguished from the Japanese in appearance, remain outsiders to Japanese society even after 8 or 10 generations after immigration. Few societies in the world are so impenetrable.

In contrast, the United States is an extraordinarily open society. Millions have come here from Europe. Millions have been brought here from Africa. And, despite earlier attempts at the exclusion of Orientals, millions of Asians have now come to our shores, and

« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »