The U.S. has had a hard and convoluted history of back and forth tolerance on immigration as a whole. One could say especially in this time and day with the current political climate, it is common to see ideologies that oppose immigrants. There are people in power that deliberately do not create spaces where immigrants and their children can feel safe, for having an anti-immigrant agenda is so popular and has even become normative. Unfortunately, these people in power are not only the policymakers who try to prohibit the happy livelihood of an immigrant, but the social dynamics in a classroom can also affect the ideologies that will poorly affect a student. People in power like to create spaces where immigrants feel unwelcome since those spaces are usually designed for Anglo-Saxon Americans people and sometimes even designed to prohibit immigrants. Politicians and lawmakers who have discriminatory ideologies advocate for spaces and policies with language barriers just to oppress and harm immigrants and their children in the U.S., with the present
Terrence Wiley and his co-author discuss the historical movements that endorse English as the official language of the movement English Only. This specific movement has been pursuing to pass a law that will make English the official language of the U.S. that will simultaneously eradicate other languages in governmental institutions. The English Only movement even went as far as to prohibit the teaching of non-English languages in schools. However, as this law was struck down by the Supreme Court back in 1923, for the Justice even acknowledge that it is un-American to want to eradicate other languages for the citizens can be diverse. Years later, with the same ideology but with a new name and a tad less rigid, Senator S. I. Hayakawa introduced the same idea to make English the official language in 1981, just called U.S. English (Wiley). They use the excuse that making English the official language would change the current “language segregation” since many in the country speak another language. As stated in the article, it could seem that at first, making English the official language would not make such a noticeable difference since English is the dominant language already. In reality, making English official could actually have many negative consequences. First, the English language has an obvious dominance in the country, which makes it already harder as a non-English speaker. There are 31 states that actually have English as their official language; the majority of the states also have English as the necessary legal language to be used in public and judicial institutions. There are laws in certain states that also require an English proficiency exam in order to pursue a career. However, English as the official language of the country will limit or even end interpreters who are governmentally funded. This would mean an end to translators in legal systems like courts or in medical institutions. These places already make it difficult for a non-English speaker and the new legislation would then create an even more divided nation. There would be no more bilingual people at the community center that are federally funded, which actually serve many minority communities that speak other languages. Like states thought before, this would not create a united country, but actually relict the connection and communication between the government and its government. Language is intrinsic to a person’s identity, and so this proposed law would evidently harm the person (Ortiz).
Wiley continues to support his argument that politicians and lawmakers focus on oppressing immigrants with policies that are harmful. Focusing on the Golden State, California has passed many laws in the past that seem "by critics as anti-immigrant" (Wiley). Many laws like Proposition 209, which seeks to end Affirmative Action, were just discriminatory against minorities, but there are also laws like Proposition 227 that focused on excluding immigrants through language. Proposition 227 was sponsored by a successful businessman Run Unz, who was running for governor as a Republican candidate. The purpose of Proposition 227 was to offer bilingual education to immigrant students, but it was ambiguously made that the law couldn't even fulfill its own purpose. Wiley said that Unz was able to " pose his initiatives as if they were advocating for immigrants and their right to learn English". Wiley then showed the challenges that arose from the proposition, explaining that the implementation did not benefit some students. Firstly, the laws did not allow bilingual education to a child unless the parent requested a waiver, and even if a parent was informed about the waiver (some weren't) there is no assurance that the child would be able to have a bilingual education for their needed to be enough students with waivers to create a class and an actual bilingual teacher to even teach the them. Wiley also observed that the most important obstacle some students faced in receiving a bilingual education was that schools across the country received a different amount of funding depending on their location. Thus, poorer neighborhoods couldn't even offer their children a bilingual education because there were no materials and resources available. Find transition.
There are people in the country who know there are horrible deeds occurring, but also try to fix it. Frank M. Ortiz furthermore described the English Only movement as “the latest form of linguistic racism”, which is the same standpoint taken by Wiley. Whereas Wiley writes an article that ends with just questions about the future, Ortiz is actually contributing more by introducing the English Plus movement, whose purpose is to fight against the English Only ideology. Their belief is that people in the U.S. should have the ability to learn English and offers a plan that is beneficial to immigrants.. Ortiz is the past Vice President/Southwest Region of League of United Latin Americans (LULAC), who have worked with the English plus movement in order to actually create language policies that are not discriminatory but offer the opportunity to teach the English language.LULAC was able to work with the Atlanta mayor and City Council in order to pass a resolution that "respects the linguistic and cultural difference of its citizen." This would be done by encouraging and creating an outline to have students learn English but still being able to develop their skills in their home language. By calling it "Active bilingualism", Ortiz offers a new integrational outlook compared to Wiley whose view was only based on the negative movements that focused solely on acculturation (Ortiz).
To further explain the English Plus concept, it is the belief that non-English speakers can become proficient in English while mating their native language. Those who support this concept also understand and support policies the necessary provide linguistic assistance to those who do not speak English, like interpreter services in medical spaces, driver license exam, etc. Overall, those who support English Plus “see lack of opportunity, not lack of motivation, as the primary barrier to acquiring English." (Lewelling). With a step forward in breaking down the linguistic barriers with new policies, bilingual education seems to become a reachable possibility. Bilingual education has shown beneficial effects for non-English speaking students and preventing a bilingual education would, in fact, harm the student. There is evidence that students will have a difficulty to learn English and perform well in school if their first language cannot be developed fully. Thus, the English plus supports use this evidence to show that bilingual education will help students learn English faster. Those who supported English Only actually wanted to immerse a student fully into an English environment, but evidence shows that students will not perform well in a place with language barriers since they do not understand what they are learning Lewelling). Thus the native language should. be used as a bridge to teach the student English. Thankfully, lawmakers and politicians have started to learn, which is why Proposition 227 from California was repealed by Proposition 58. Now schools can be able to develop a multilingual program that supports and helps non-English speaking students learn the language. Before the new proposition was passed, there was enormous evidence on how Proposition 227 failed and enormously harmed the majority of non-English speaking immigrants. Wiley knew that the Proposition 227 would make the accessibility to English nonexistent, which is shown by the evidence that “less than 5% of California public schools now offer multilingual programs, though there are now 1.4 million English learners — about 80% of whom speak only Spanish” (Ulloa).