The number of people who speak a language other than English at home has hit an all-time high of 61.8 million — with one in five Americans now using a foreign language at home, according to a new study.
The
Center for Immigration Studies report finds the 2013 figure is up 2.2 million since 2010, with the biggest spike in speakers of Spanish, Chinese and Arabic. In 2000, those speaking a foreign language at home numbered 18 percent, in 1990 it was 14 percent and in 1980 it was 11 percent, the Center said.
The study also found that of school-age children, more than one in five speaks a foreign language at home — including 44 percent in California and roughly one in three students in Texas, Nevada, and New York.
"[M]ore surprisingly, it is now one in seven students in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Nebraska and Delaware; and one out of eight students in Kansas, Utah, Minnesota, and Idaho," the study found.
The new numbers come as the Obama administration considers steps to
create legal status for millions of illegal immigrants.
"It is important to understand that the enormous growth in foreign language use reflects past policy decisions," report co-author Steven Camarota said,
according to Breitbart news.
"Allowing in over one million new legal immigrants a year and to a lesser extent tolerating illegal immigration has important implications for preserving a common language. 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."
Several lawmakers have presented bills that would declare English as the
official language of the United States. In September, Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman proposed a bill to require the federal government to use English in most cases, and would repeal language allowing for bilingual elections.
According to the report, seven foreign languages other than English are spoken by more than a million people inside their homes, with Spanish the most prominent, at 38.4 million. Chinese is second with 3 million; national Philippines language Tagalog is third, with 1.6 million; Vietnamese fourth, with 1.4 million; French, fifth with 1.3 million; and Korean and Arabic are tied for sixth with 1.1 million each.
"What we need to do is make sure everyone coming into the United States understands who we are and that we are founded on Judeo-Christian values, that there is one rule of law and that’s what’s on the books and it’s not Sharia and we need to make sure we don’t engage in the same kind of mistakes in Europe where they did not engage in assimilation," former Michigan Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview with Breitbart News.
"[Europe] did not engage in assimilation so you ended up with pockets of decay in the Netherlands," Hoekstra added. "I’m a native born Dutch guy, so I’m disappointed to see it happen. But where you did not have the assimilation then you have these pockets now where people are saying ‘We want Sharia law here,’ and you end up saying ‘No, no, no, no. That’s not how it works in the Netherlands. That’s not how it works in America.’ We have our sets of values and some things, and you know what, if you find our values and our laws somehow stifling and you can’t believe you can operate within them, then maybe America is not the best place for you to go."
"There have to be clear expectations for the kinds of behavior for the people who we allow to come into the United States. It’s a privilege; it is not a right," he said.
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