The Center for Immigration Studies has released a new report that says a record high 61.8 million American residents speak a foreign language—other than English—at home, including one in five residents over four years old. The population of foreign-language speakers has increased by 2.2 million people between 2010 and 2013, according to the report.
CIS believes policy decisions have caused the rapid growth of foreign-language speakers living in the United States. “Allowing in over one million new legal immigrants a year and to a lesser extent tolerating illegal immigration has important implication [sic] for preserving a common language,” Steven Camarota, CIS director of research and co-author of the report, said in a release. “For too long we have given little consideration to whether continuing this level of immigration, mostly legal, hinders the assimilation of immigrants and their children.”
The number of foreign-language speaking residents has increased steadily for decades. The population of foreign-language speaking residents has grown by nearly 15 million people since 2000 and grown by close to 30 million people since 1990, according to the report. As a result, approximately 27.2 million people who speak a foreign language at home—or 44 percent of all people who use a foreign language at home—are not immigrants. And the states with the largest percentage increases of foreign-language-speaking residents since 2010 include North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Nevada, according to the report.
The number of Spanish speakers grew by 1.4 million between 2010 and 2013, far outpacing the growth of all other foreign-language speaking populations. During that same time frame, the number of Chinese- and Arabic-speaking people grew in the hundreds of thousands, and the number of Urdu speakers grew by 50,000. More than 25 million people who speak a foreign language at home say they speak English less than very well, according to the report.