If immigrants speak a huge multitude of different languages, rather than just a few, it is harder for their host country to communicate with them in all those languages. Yet the federal government requires that the public schools educate every non-English-speaking student, and accommodate their limited English proficiency, even if no one else in a school speaks the student’s language, and the student is an illegal alien. Schools have to translate notices to students’ families into every obscure language spoken by any student in the school, and provide adequate instruction to all English language learners, regardless of what language they speak (which may include bilingual education as a bridge to English language proficiency).
Soon, schools will have to accommodate hundreds of African languages that no school staff speak, and that are utterly unlike English and hard to learn. That’s because African immigration is rapidly rising even as immigration from Mexico has declined over the past generation. This will cost billions and billions of dollars annually. The New York Times reported that “African migration to the U.S. soars”, with “African migrants” going through “Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico” on their way to “arrive at the southern U.S. border.” Thousands of people have recently migrated from African countries like Guinea and the Congo to New York City, like the 1300 migrants from Guinea who recently swarmed New York’s City Hall. A pro-immigration historian points out that because African birthrates remain high, while Latin American birthrates are rapidly falling, “African immigration” is “the future.” New York City has already spent over $5 billion on food, shelter, and services for migrants. Over 3,000 languages are spoken in Africa.
In the last couple generations, most immigrants spoke either English or Spanish, making it possible to communicate with them and their families. Immigrants from Asia often already spoke some English upon immigrating, and most ultimately become English-proficient — 71% of foreign-born Indian Americans are fully English proficient, for example. Hispanic immigrants are usually not English-proficient — only about a third of them — but their language is closely related to English, so some Americans can easily learn Spanish to communicate with them and their children, and millions of American citizens speak both Spanish and English. 30-40% of all words in English have a closely related word in Spanish, and the languages have structural similarities and similar sounds — plurals in both languages end in an audible “s,” for example (unlike many Latin or Germanic languages, where plurals end in something else, or French, where the “s” in plural words is silent).
New York City now has thousands of migrants from Africa, who poured across America’s southern border — mostly illegally — and ended up living at taxpayer expense in hotels there. 65,000 migrants are now being sheltered in hotels, dormitories, and other shelters at New York City’s expense. Some of the migrants are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the largest country in Sub-Saharan Africa (The Congo is one of the poorest and most violent nations on Earth). The migrants are now complaining that New York City doesn’t speak their languages, making it hard to communicate with the city, and hard for their kids to get an education. As one Congolese woman told the City Council’s committees on immigration and hospitals, “In the Congo, you have more than 500 languages… we need people who speak the native language to teach us. That is what we are asking the city [New York City] and the city is refusing to accommodate.”
It’s not surprising that the city isn’t accommodating all these languages. It can’t! No city official speaks these languages. No teacher speaks these languages. Many of these languages exist only in oral — rather than written — form. These languages cannot easily be learned by an American, because they are not Indo-European languages — like English or Spanish — but rather are from utterly different language families, like the Niger-Congo language family. Some of these languages may not be spoken by a single U.S. citizen.
But accommodating all those languages is what New York City schools must do, if they wish to avoid having the federal Education Department cut off all their funds. The Supreme Court ruled that schools must educate even children who are illegal aliens, in its decision in Plyler v. Doe (1982). And as a lawyer explained, “the Education Department, where I used to work as a civil rights attorney, interprets Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act] to require that school districts translate all notices into every conceivable language spoken by even one student or parent using the school system, such as Hmong, and to ignore the cost of oral translations.” The lawyer argued that this requirement was “contrary to basic principles of disparate-impact law, which recognize that high cost can be a defense (not even the Justice Department suggests that costs should be ignored), and that an institutional practice that inadvertently harms just a single minority group member is not illegal discrimination unless it systematically excludes members of that person’s minority group.”
Few school districts ever manage to fully comply with the Education Department’s rules requiring accommodation of English-language learners. As the former Education Department lawyer recounted, “When I worked in the Washington headquarters of the Office for Civil Rights, one of the senior lawyers there boasted that every investigation for compliance with the bilingual education regulations she enforced, always found the school district to have violated Title VI. The important decision was which school district to investigate; once the investigation was launched, a finding of non-compliance with Title VI was a foregone conclusion.” Arlington County, Virginia, is one of America’s richest school districts, and one of the most devoted to “equity” and “inclusion,” but when it was investigated, it, like other school systems, was found to be in violation of Education Department rules requiring accommodation of each non-English-speaking student.
The Justice Department and other government agencies also impose costly duties on businesses to accommodate non-English speakers. For example, the government has told businesses to translate from foreign languages into English at their own expense, and communicate with non-English-speakers in their own languages, if the businesses have customers who pay using federal programs — like a doctor who accepts Medicare or Medicaid. The former Education Department lawyer pointed out that the Justice Department had promulgated guidelines requiring accommodation of non-English speakers under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Justice Department guidelines indicate that recipients of federal funds, such as private health care providers, can be liable for “disparate impact” discrimination if they fail to provide translation services for just a single non-English speaker. Influenced by such guidelines, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest has demanded that drugstores hire bilingual interpreters.” The lawyer argued the Justice Department had “overstepped its authority” by promulgating these guidelines, but they remain in force to this very day.
The Justice Department also requires state courts and state, city, and county programs to accommodate non-English speakers, because state and local government receive some of their funding through federal programs. The cost of such language mandates imposed on state and local governments and businesses runs in the billions of dollars, and this high cost is passed on to American consumers and taxpayers.
In the 20th Century, there was fairly little immigration from Africa to the U.S., and the immigration that did occur was disproportionally of educated African elites. Many came from countries where people often speak English, like Ghana and Nigeria.
But the African migrants that are now pouring across our southern border are much less likely to speak English, and much less educated, than the African immigrants who have long been in the U.S. Few of them are coming from prosperous, English-speaking countries like Ghana. More are coming from non-English-speaking countries like Guinea and the Congo. Thousands of recent African migrants can barely read or write, and come from countries where even most people who’ve attended school can’t do basic arithmetic (there are many middle-school students in Africa who can’t add 11+7 correctly — after years of schooling, they still don’t know that 11+7=18).
