Over the past several years, Americans have become acquainted with activists judges, who, as President Bush puts it, want to "legislate from the bench." It now seems that there is an even more sinister crop of activist judges: those who want to parent from the bench.
Recently a judge in Lebanon, Tennessee ordered a woman to learn English at a fourth grade level or lose custody of her children. The judge's ruling read, "the court specially informs the mother that if she does not make the effort to learn English, she is running the risk of losing any connection -- legally, morally and physically -- with her daughter forever."
One insurance agent familiar with the case remarked, "if people are going to be in this country, we all have a moral obligation to learn to speak the language," adding, "I know if I was in Mexico I would make an effort to learn Hispanic."
As a recovering Tennessean myself, I can assure you that if ability to speak English on a fourth grade level were a requirement for citizenship, Tennesseans would quickly become America's largest export.
But that aside, the ruling is almost certainly indicative of the irrational fear stirred up in small communities like Lebanon, which has seen an increase of over 1,200 in the number of "Hispanic"-speaking immigrants in recent years. These worried citizens buy the arguments made by xenophobes of Pat Buchanan's ilk, who, like Chicken Little, claim that an increase in immigration foretells the fall of our country into a third world Spanish-speaking hellhole called "Mexamerica."
This warped idea rests on several false premises. The first is that immigrants come here to leech off our welfare state. The reality is, they come here to work, they are the ones keeping the welfare state solvent.
Immigrant labor adds 1 trillion dollars to the economy each year, and, according to the National Academy of Science, the average immigrant (legal and illegal) dpays more in taxes than he collects in social services to the tune of $80,000 over a lifetime, including adding a net $500 billion to the Social Security trust fund over 25 years. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has said, "I've always argued that this country has benefited immensely from the fact that we draw people from all over the world."
Perhaps this is why President Bush has recognized the need to need to overhaul the immigration system, calling it "outdated [and] unsuited to the needs of our economy and to the values of our country" in his State of the Union address. Indeed, it make sense that in a post-NAFTA world with emphasis on the free movement of capital, we could only benefit further by allowing a free movement of labor.
The second false premise is that immigrants don't assimilate. Indeed, it may seem that they don't because a huge portion of Hispanic immigrants in this country are first-generation Americans. History shows us, though, that by the third generation, almost all traces of native language and culture have been shed. The judge's objection in the Tennessee case seems to be that by not speaking English to her child, the mother is disadvantaging her child for the future. But parents make all kinds of decisions which have similar effects, but which aren't grounds for removing custody, such as feeding them fattening foods or not reading to them. Language is the least of these problems because nearly every sociolinguistic study has proven that almost no effort, on the behalf of parents or anyone else, can stop a child from learning a language which he finds to be socially and economically dominant, as long there is some exposure to that language -- a social force far more powerful than a judge's edict.
So, given that immigrants don't pose a threat to our economy or culture, it seems the best way to fully integrate immigrants economically and culturally would be to remove the stigma of illegality which makes them vulnerable to blackmail and exploitation by employers and bring them into the mainstream of education and taxation.
The wrong way to reap the benefits of immigration would be to drive the immigrant communities away from mainstream America through threatening judicial edicts and a condescending culture which says they have a "moral obligation" to assimilate. No one has an obligation to assimilate, people assimilate because they want to, and no one wants to assimilate to a culture that treats him like a second class citizen.
And as for Tennesseans lobbing invectives against those who don't speak English on a fourth-grade level, I suggest they mind the walls of their own glass house.
Herb Ladley is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at hladley@cavlierdaily.com
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