According to the 2000 Census, the population of the country over 5 years old is 262,375,152. Of that number, 215,423,557 or 82.1% speak only English at home. Of the remaining people 35,964,744 (13.7%) speak English "very well" or "well", 7,620,719 (2.9%) speak English "not well" and another 3,366,132 (1.3%) speak it "not at all."
In other words, English has done pretty darn well in maintaining its status as the primary language of the United States, considering that 95.8 percent of the legal and counted population speaks it well, very well or as their only language, and, at the very worst, only 4.2% of that population doesn't have fluency in it.
But what about the illegal immigrant population, who are not counted in the Census? Well, the INS estimate of the illegal immigrant population for 1990-2000 says that there are 7 million unauthorized residents in the U.S. Surely some sizable portion of that number speak English, but let's take the absolute possible worst case scenario and assume that none of them do, and let's also assume that they're all age 5 or above.
Using these rough figures, the speaking population of the US goes from 262.4 million to 269.4 million, and the number of non-English speakers in our worst case estimate goes from 11 million to 18 million, or from 4.2% to 6.7%.
That's the very worst case, that less than 7% of the total resident population of the United States, both legal and illegal, doesn't speak English.
So why, tell me again, is it that we are in need of naming English as an official language? What need is there for a national language to unify our increasing diverse population, when over 90% of us, in all our glorious diversity, speak it already? Where's the crisis here?
But let's take a look at California, which seems to be the poster child for those who make anti-immigrant arguments. California has a legal speaking population of 31.4 million, of which about 19.0 million (60.5%) speak English only. Another 9.0 million (28.8%) speak English "very well" or "well", which means that 89.3% of the legal speaking population is fluent in English, and 10.7% (3.4 million) is not.
The illegal population of California is estimated to be 2.2 million, and if we make the same worst-case assumptions as above (i.e. all of them are of speaking age and none of them speak English), that would make 5.4 million people out of a total resident population of 31.6 million who did not speak English, or 11.3% of California's population.
But it turns out that California is not the worst cast example. Doing this same calculation for the five other states (Arizona, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas) which, with California, the INS estimates contain 68.5% of the unauthorized residents in the country shows that, using our extreme assumptions, Texas would have 12.2% of its population as non-English speaking, more than California, and Arizona would have 11.4%, about the same.
Obviously, these are rough estimates using extremely conservative assumptions. In reality, the illegal population may be higher, but also a significant percentage of them would be considered to be fluent in English. We don't know how those changes would offset each other, but we should now know that, as best as can be told from the available figures, it's only at worst, in the states most affected by illegal immigration, only about a tenth of the people living there who don't speak English.
So, again, where's the damn crisis?
Note: I posted this and then almost immediately withdrew it to correct some of the figures. It was re-posted within a few minutes.
Addenda: I haven't written anything about the while illegal immigration issue here, partly because I've been involved in a discussion about it elsewhere, but also because I see it primarily as a "crisis" ginned up by the right-wing for their own purposes. While there is certainly a problem, especially in places like Southern California, and every nation should have control over its borders, the "solutions" being offered (separately) by Bush and the Republicans in Congress are generally either extreme overkill or entirely ridiculous.
What you need to do is first make it easy to verify people's immigration/citizenship status. Second, you need to impose extremely harsh financial penalties on people who employ illegal immigrants, such that it's easily worth their while to either pay someone else more money or else live without the help. Third, you give illegally employed people big prizes for turning themselves and their employer in (say, you get deported but you get to take the fine money back home with you) so employers become paranoid about hiring illegals. This would be more effective than a wall, cheaper than a wall, and wouldn't involve killing anybody. If conservatives were in the habit of actually thinking seriously about public policy, we'd have proposals along these lines coming down the pike. Instead we get, "The only thing that might work is a physical barrier."
Kevin Drum's had some very good pieces on this topic too, such as this one from a couple of months ago.
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Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
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Corrections
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the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
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