Keio-educated American politician calls for English First in Nashville

And how many langugaes should be covered by always-present multilingual staff? Does a driver’s 50 interpreters waiting in back? Who pays for it?

Is it really needed? We who live in Japan can usually find info we need in English (or Chinese, or Korean) on the Internet, either official or on boards, or get a friend to help us out at the shiyakosho.
And those who go to the USA don’t have to deal with kanji, much easier to look up words.

Of course, technology is making the whole issue moot.
Babelfish and various Firefox plugins can translate documents for you, look up something on Wikipedia, and the same entry is often available in a multitude of other languages. At least well-enough to do your basic government business. US Army is using machine translators like something out of Star Trek. Soon your mobile phone could have a built-in semi-useful translator.

Chinese people in the US, continued to seek jobs in the US despite much worse efforts to stop them than this, still don’t speak English. Navaho and other Native Americans don’t speak English.

No one says people don’t need to learn the language. It is stupid, however, to pretend that is easy and people won’t need help while they learn and in times of stress.

This city could pay the yearly salaries and benefits for about 6 police officers with what is is spending to hold this special election.

No, no, to be a good modern American you should *demand* to speak Finnish, and decry everyone who doesn’t as intolerant and anti-immigrant.

Where does the federal government get there money from bone head.

The problem was in the old days the immigrants busted their a**es to learn English. There was what was called the “three generation rule”: the first generation (those who immigrated) would learn just enough English to get by. They were (as an overly broad “rule”) too busy working to put food on the table to take classes or self-learn enough to be fluent. Their kids, the second generation, would be bilingual from growing up going to school and speaking English outside the home while speaking their parents’ language in the home. Their parents would come to rely on them to translate documents and other important information for them. The third generation would grow up speaking English in the home and outside, and would only know the language of the “old country” from visiting their grandparents. But they probably would not be able to speak it.

That was then. Now you have people demanding that their kids be schooled, in public schools, in Spanish. You have immigrants demanding to be catered for in their language, with the results that the State has to prepare all documents in multiple languages (I heard somewhere that California must prepare documents in 8 or 9 languages). To quote Col. Potter, “Bull Hockey!” If you want to live in the US, then learn to speak English or pay for an interpreter yourself.

In what sense?

“Now if it were a situation like Canada where you have to embrace both French and English, then I can understand why a proposal to put English first would not be warranted.”

Ah, but only in the English-speaking Provinces (in other words, everywhere but Quebec)! The good folks running Quebec have no such problems with demanding that Quebecois (they don’t speak “French” in Quebec, any French-speaker can tell you that) be first, that all businesses with signs visible from outside must have such signs in Quebecois only (no English), and that signs inside shops must be in Quebecois first, with English (if it is to be used) in smaller type underneath the Quebecois. Canada is only “bi-lingual” in the other Provinces.