By Mauro E. Mujica
Chairman of the Board/CEO of U.S.ENGLISH

Buncombe County, North Carolina, is a county on the cutting edge of multi-culturalism. Over the past few years, its Hispanic population has doubled in size, to more than two thousand. Since some of the new Hispanic residents did not speak English, they were isolated from the community at large. So Buncombe County took action:

• The district attorney's office hired a former exchange student from Spain to teach a four-week course in Spanish to county prosecutors.
• Thirty emergency dispatchers were given a three-day course in Spanish at the local technical college.
• 145 firefighters and emergency medical technicians were given a mandatory two-hour course in Spanish.

One might wonder just how much Spanish can be learned in two hours, three days, or even four weeks, but there is a larger issue-while there is nothing wrong with people learning to speak Spanish, Buncombe County's actions show how much the radical multi-culturalists have changed the traditional relationship between immigrants and the United States. It used to be that immigrants were expected to learn English. Now, government employees are expected to learn Spanish.

Wouldn't it be better for Buncombe County to concentrate on teaching English to immigrants? That way, the immigrants would be able to communicate not only with firefighters, emergency personnel, and prosecutors, but also with bankers, teachers, and neighbors. Learning English would open the doorway to a better life for the new residents of Buncombe County.

It is ironic that at a time when people around the globe are learning English, turning it into the common language of business all over the world, the idea of English as the common language of the United States is being undermined. Today in America, you can take your citizenship test, vote, get a driver's license, apply for and receive welfare benefits, and graduate from a public high school-all without learning English.

Under pressure from anti-assimilationists, more and more state and local governments are providing more and more services in more and more languages. For example, New York offers driver's license exams in twenty-three languages, Massachusetts in twenty-five, and California in thirty-three. Even that is barely one tenth of the 329 languages spoken nationwide.

The sheer diversity of languages in the United States means that the Buncombe County solution is impractical. Even if the geniuses who work for our government could learn another language in a four-week crash course, it would still take over twenty-five years to learn all 329 languages.

But it is not just practical considerations that argue strongly for one common language. The future of the United States could very well be at stake. The people of this country are of different races, different religions, and different political views. Without something to bind us together, how long can we remain united?

The multi-culturalists claim that our common language is unimportant to unity, that it is a shared commitment to democracy and freedom that binds our nation together. But ask yourself how we would even know our fellow-citizens shared that commitment if we could not communicate. English may not be our only common bond as Americans, but it is a necessary one. Allowing that bond to fray is a risk we cannot afford to take.

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This page was last updated 04/26/99.

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