The Founding Immigrants

July 3, 2007
By KENNETH C. DAVIS
Dorset, Vt.

A PROMINENT American once said, about immigrants, "Few of their children in the
country learn English... The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both
languages ... Unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will
soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to
preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious."

This sentiment did not emerge from the rancorous debate over the immigration
bill defeated last week in the Senate. It was not the lament of some guest of
Lou Dobbs or a Republican candidate intent on wooing bedrock conservative
votes. Guess again.

Voicing this grievance was Benjamin Franklin. And the language so vexing to him
was the German spoken by new arrivals to Pennsylvania in the 1750s, a wave of
immigrants whom Franklin viewed as the "most stupid of their nation."

About the same time, a Lutheran minister named Henry Muhlenberg, himself a
recent arrival from Germany, worried that the "whole country is being flooded
with ordinary, extraordinary and unprecedented wickedness and crimes. ... Oh,
what a fearful thing it is to have so many thousands of unruly and brazen
sinners come into this free air and unfenced country."

These German masses yearning to breathe free were not the only targets of
colonial fear and loathing. Echoing the opinions of colonial editors and
legislators, Ben Franklin was also troubled by the British practice of dumping
its felons on America. With typical Franklin wit, he proposed sending
rattlesnakes to Britain in return. (This did not, however, preclude numerous
colonists from purchasing these convicts as indentured servants.)

And still earlier in Pennsylvania, the Scotch-Irish had bred discontent, as
their penchant for squatting on choice real estate ran headlong against the
colony's founders, the Penn family, and their genteel notions about who should
own what.

Often, the disdain for the foreign was inflamed by religion. Bostons Puritans
hanged several Friends after a Bay Colony ban on Quakerism. In Virginia, the
Anglicans arrested Baptists.

But the greatest scorn was generally reserved for Catholics --- usually meaning
Irish, French, Spanish and Italians. Generations of white American Protestants
resented newly arriving "Papists," and even in colonial Maryland, a supposed
haven for them, Roman Catholics were nonetheless forbidden to vote and hold
public office.

Once independent, the new nation began to carve its views on immigrants into
law. In considering New York's Constitution, for instance, John Jay --- later to
become the first chief justice of the Supreme Court --- suggested erecting a
wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.

By 1790, with the United States Constitution firmly in place, the first federal
citizenship law restricted naturalization to "free white persons" who had been
in the country for two years. That requirement was later pushed back to five
years and, in 1798, to 14 years.

Then, as now, politics was key. Federalists feared that too many immigrants were
joining the opposition. Under the 1798 Alien Act --- with the threat of war in
the air over French attacks on American shipping --- President John Adams had
license to deport anyone he considered "dangerous." Although his secretary of
state favored mass deportations, Adams never actually put anybody on a boat.

Back then, the French warranted the most suspicion, but there were other
worrisome "aliens." A wave of "wild Irish" refugees was thought to harbor
dangerous radicals. Harsh "anti-coolie" laws later singled out the Chinese. And,
of course, the millions of "involuntary" immigrants from Africa and their
offspring were regarded merely as persons "held to service."

Scratch the surface of the current immigration debate and beneath the posturing
lies a dirty secret. Anti-immigrant sentiment is older than America itself. Born
before the nation, this abiding fear of the "huddled masses" emerged in the
early republic and gathered steam into the 19th and 20th centuries, when
nativist political parties, exclusionary laws and the Ku Klux Klan swept the
land.

As we celebrate another Fourth of July, this picture of American intolerance
clashes sharply with tidy schoolbook images of the great melting pot. Why has
the land of "all men are created equal" forged countless ghettoes and intricate
networks of social exclusion? Why the signs reading "No Irish Need Apply"? And
why has each new generation of immigrants had to face down a rich glossary of
now unmentionable epithets? Disdain for what is foreign is, sad to say, as
American as apple pie, slavery and lynching.

That fence along the Mexican border now being contemplated by Congress is just
the latest vestige of a venerable tradition, at least as old as John Jay's "wall
of brass." "Don't fence me in" might be America's unofficial anthem of
unfettered freedom, but too often the subtext is, "Fence everyone else out."

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Immigrant parents struggle to keep their children bilingual
By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff  |  July 22, 2007

LAWRENCE -- After a lunch of hot dogs and rice, Jordy Berges blasted a ball off
the wall of the lunchroom at his mother's office, his stomping grounds for the
summer.

"No juegues aquí," Yovanna Berges scolded her 7-year-old son, telling him in
Spanish to stop.

"Sorry," he answered her, in English.

Berges, an immigrant from Peru, is growing accustomed to such conversations with
her son. She is struggling to raise him to speak English and Spanish fluently,
which might not seem like a big challenge in the city with the highest
proportion of Latinos in Massachusetts. But researchers say Berges and immigrant
parents nationwide are confronting a difficult truth: Their children are losing
their languages.

According to research presented to Congress in May, even the children of
immigrants prefer to speak English by the time they are adults.

Rubén G. Rumbaut, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine, and
his team of researchers looked at 5,700 adults in their 20s and 30s in Southern
California from different generations to see how long their language survived. A
key finding centered on 1,900 American-born children of immigrants. The shift
toward English among them was swift: While 87 percent grew up speaking another
language at home, only 34 percent said they spoke it well by adulthood. And
nearly 70 percent said they preferred to speak English.

"English wins, and it does so in short order," said Rumbaut, who presented his
findings to the US House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration in May. "What
we're talking about is a real phenomenon."

It is difficult for children to sustain their parents' languages amid the tidal
wave of American pop culture, including movies and television, coupled with
societal pressure to speak only English. Most schools and communities do little
to preserve bilingualism, Rumbaut said. Even bilingual education programs, which
Massachusetts voters dismantled in 2002, were commonly designed to help students
make the transition to English-only classrooms.

Generations of immigrants have seen their languages fade, but Rumbaut said the
cost is higher now as businesses expand overseas, the United States is more
diverse, and national security agencies are clamoring for people who speak
foreign languages. The children themselves are losing a skill that could give
them an edge in the job market.

The erosion of language cuts across all backgrounds, Rumbaut said. In his study,
less than 25 percent of the US-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese
immigrants said they spoke their parents' languages well. Chinese is one of the
languages President Bush declared a priority for national security last year.

Spanish was found to survive longer, largely because Southern California is a
high-immigrant area and Spanish is ubiquitous on television and radio and in
newspapers.

Still, gaps emerged. Almost all second-generation Mexican- Americans were raised
speaking Spanish, but only 60 percent spoke it well by early adulthood, and half
preferred English. By the third generation, barely 10 percent spoke Spanish
well, according to the study; almost all preferred English.

While Rumbaut's study did not include Massachusetts, he said it was even more
likely that language loss would occur here, because immigrants make up only 14
percent of the population, about half the percentage in California, meaning that
children here have more exposure to English.

Until now, much of the debate over language has focused on the successful
campaigns in Massachusetts, California, and Arizona to end bilingual education
in public schools. Bilingual education was still strong in California when the
participants in Rumbaut's study were young, but Rumbaut said English still
prevailed.

In 2002, Massachusetts voters declared that all instruction must be in English,
except for children on waivers that allow them to take bilingual classes and in
a small number of schools that teach two languages simultaneously. Those
programs, for example, teach English and a language such as Chinese, to native
speakers of both.

Many Massachusetts parents and advocates say they are scrambling to keep
children's native languages from slipping away. In Boston, advocates are pushing
for more two-way schools. At Brockton High, children of Cape Verdean and
Brazilian immigrants sign up for Portuguese lessons.

Even Rosalie Porter, an author of the Massachusetts initiative that dismantled
bilingual education in schools, said she favors expanding two-way schools as
long as parents want them.

Berges, who is married to an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, is raising
Jordy in Lawrence, a majority Latino city, where 83 percent of schoolchildren
speak another language at home.

Along Essex Street, one of the main thoroughfares, there are signs in Spanish
advertising a store selling "Ropa para Caballeros," or men's clothing.
Spanish-language newspapers abound.

But her son is fascinated by all things American, including Spiderman and
hamburgers, and his communication with her reflects that. The other day he
complained of a headache and said, "I have a pain in my cabeza."

"I'm afraid he's going to stop speaking Spanish," said Berges, an outreach
worker at the community service center run by Greater Lawrence Community Action
Council Inc.

Julia Sigalovsky of Sudbury, a scientist from Russia who arrived here in 1989,
said she was stunned when her 11-year-old son suddenly refused to speak Russian
after a few months in this country.

When she and her husband chatted in Russian at the supermarket, he was
mortified. "Speak English," he told them.

With her second son, she tried harder. She sang him lullabies in Russian, hired
a Russian-speaking babysitter, and inundated him with movies in her native
tongue, like the Russian version of "Winnie the Pooh."

Now 14, he hardly speaks Russian, either. At home, the parents speak Russian and
their sons respond in English. Even the family dog, answers to English. "We
speak two languages," Sigalovsky said. "It looks totally insane for somebody who
is watching."

While researchers and advocates agree that children of immigrants are losing
languages, they disagree about what to do about it.

Porter, though she favors two-way programs, said English should be the priority
of public schools. Parents can teach another language at home, she said.

"It is an economic advantage, but every single child does not want to keep two
languages," said Porter, who still speaks the Italian she learned from her
immigrant parents. "Some kids will become professors of language. Some kids will
become international bankers. Some kids will not bother with any of that, and
they'll become successful in their own way."

Samuel Hurtado is coordinator of the Latino Education Action Network in Boston,
where 39 percent of students speak another language at home, according to the
state. Hurtado said the city should expand two-way programs so that children can
maintain both languages. Many parents cannot afford luxuries such as tutors or
trips abroad, said Hurtado, who plans to teach his 1-year-old son English and
Spanish at home and enroll him in a Chinese immersion program in school.

"We talk so much about globalism, and we're missing a lot of opportunities for
our children to be raised bilingual," he said. "This is becoming more of a class
thing. When you go to the suburbs, parents get the value that it is to be
bilingual."

Some parents say they are more concerned their children learn English than their
native language. But Juanita Garcia of Methuen said she wants her children to
learn Spanish so they can speak to their grandmother, who is visiting from
Puerto Rico.

One day last week, all three generations went out for hamburgers. The parents
and grandmother sat at one table and spoke Spanish; the teenagers sat at another
and spoke English.

"I want them to have two languages," Garcia said in Spanish. "But all the time,
they speak English."

Maria Sacchetti can be reached at msacchetti at globe dot com.