Bush’s Radio Address a Mistake
His continued inaction on EO 13166 a disaster.

By Jim Boulet Jr., executive director, English First.
May 7, 2001 9:30 a.m.

resident 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HHS is even hearing from the American Medical Association that these regulations must be withdrawn.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.