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Bush's Saturday radio address in Spanish will guarantee that he
will receive complaints from those claiming
to represent
speakers of Farsi, Khmer, Tagalog, and the 300 or so other tongues
spoken in the U.S.
Admittedly,
political speeches in languages other than English are not unknown
to American politics. But we now live in a time when America has
turned its back on the importance of assimilation. A gentle hint
that immigrants might have some responsibility to learn a minimal
amount of English is considered beyond the pale of polite political
discourse.
Jay
Nordlinger recently made the daring suggestion that President
Bush's party would do better politically by leaving the identity
politics racket to the Democrats and making "a hard appeal
to Americanism — to Americans as Americans, rather than as members
of groups, each in his lil' tribe."
But until Nordlinger
is made head of the Republican National Committee, I suspect linguistic
pandering will be a bipartisan occupation. Never mind that this
sort of thing is an insult to the many immigrants who have undertaken
the hard work of learning English. Whichever political party decides
to appeal to those assimilated immigrants will reap a rich harvest
of votes.
Ultimately a Bush speech or two in Spanish will have less impact
on this nation's linguistic future than his ultimate decision on
the repeal of Executive
Order 13166. Unfortunately, the administration has been sending
mixed signals on that front lately.
Last week "immigrant
advocates met with White House officials" on the Department
of Health and Human Services (HHS) policy
guidance which created an absolute entitlement
to services in any language from all HHS agencies and every recipient
of HHS funds.
For some reason
no official English groups were told of this gathering. Perhaps
our invitations were lost in the mail.
HHS is even
hearing from the American
Medical Association that these regulations must be withdrawn.
The AMA cited a case of a physician spending $237 for an interpreter
but paid just $38 by Medicaid.
Doctors aren't
the only folks will feel the bite of EO 13166 on their bank accounts.
The New York Daily News reported that translation services
for 911 calls cost the New York City Police Department $1.1
million for the current fiscal year, after reaching $760,000
in fiscal year 2000.
Multiply this
amount of money by every agency of government at the federal, state,
county, and local levels, and the resulting sum might even stagger
Senator Paul
Wellstone (D., MN).
Thankfully,
the Treasury
Department has agreed to receive comments by interested persons
on its EO 13166 regulations.
Treasury could be the first federal agency to withdraw these senseless
regulations.
White House
spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration has "no plans
to repeal" EO 13166. But one of the main justifications for
EO
13166 was the Sandoval
case just overturned by the Supreme Court.
Frankly, if
President Bush chooses to give a speech in Spanish explaining why
he is withdrawing EO 13166, I wouldn't mind.
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