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Epilogue In June 2007, proposed legislation that would have constituted the most sweeping change in immigration policy in decades died in the Senate after a pitched battle between supporters and opponents of the bill. The clamor for immigration reform has been fueled by a heightened concern for security in the post-9/11 era that has drawn particular attention to securing the national borders. The economic dislocations and uncertainty caused by globalization constitute another source for the sense of urgency attached to passing new immigration legislation. However, much of the debate around the proposed legislation reflected familiar fears of the country becoming overrun with immigrants who would threaten the American way of life by failing to assimilate . Now as in years past, some of that fear was expressed in discussions of the meaning and place of English in American society. The various versions of the immigration bill attempted to secure the borders against illegal immigrants, allow some illegal immigrants already in the country to obtain citizenship, and change the criteria for new immigrants to enter the country. In May 2006 and again in June 2007, legislators introduced amendments to allay the fears of those who feel that the continued flow of immigrants into the country poses a cultural threat. These amendments would have designated English as the national language, denied the right to obtain government services in any other language, and required some proficiency in English for citizenship. Supporters of these measures claimed that they would merely acknowledge the crucial role of English in the national culture. Critics saw it as fostering an atmosphere of linguistic and cultural intolerance and anti-immigrant sentiment more generally. Efforts at the local level to address illegal immigration in the absence of any acceptable federal action have included similar language provisions such as the Hazelton, Pennsylvania, ordinance that, among other measures, would make English the official language. Nor is this impulse to legislate language a new one. Since the early 1980s when the English-only movement led by “U.S. English” came on the scene, dozens of measures to declare English the official language have been proposed in Congress and in a number of 180 • epilogue states. Just as the measures involving border security and how to deal with illegal migrants already in the country are largely aimed at Hispanic migrants and Mexicans in particular, language measures are primarily a response to the Spanish-speaking immigrants in the country. The popular sentiment behind the desire to legislate the role of the English language in American life is encapsulated in the statement of a seventy-one-year-old man, living in an upper-middle-class Colorado suburb, in response to the immigration situation: “Portugal is Portugal because of the Portuguese language; Spain is Spanish; France is—God knows—France is French; Germany is Germany, all because of language. . . . That, to me, is the thing that holds, that builds a country.”1 In the United States today, as in years past, the association between language usage and nationality is pervasive. Even though many of those who favor making English the national or official language claim that this does not imply any animosity toward immigrant languages, America’s more recent history with linguistic minorities suggests otherwise, especially when contrasted with the linguistic histories of other nations. Language policy scholar James Crawford draws a telling comparison between the United States and Australia, another nation of immigrants . Although English is the official language of Australia, a designation that is actually stronger than “national” language, that country also fosters the preservation of immigrant languages and promotes non-English languages among English speakers. As Crawford notes regarding the difference between the two countries, “Australia doesn’t have an English-only movement. . . . They don’t use language as a lightning rod for expressing your views on immigration. Language has not become a major symbolic dividing line.”2 That dividing line rests on a couple of false assumptions in addition to the notion that language and nation are coterminous. One is that the predominance of English is being threatened by the large influx of immigrants in recent decades and by Spanish-speaking immigrants in particular. As a number of studies demonstrate, this is just not so. Although there are pockets with large immigrant populations where non-English languages are more commonly used than in other parts of the country, the overwhelming majority of the population speaks English exclusively. Today as in the past, foreign language groups typically become monolingual in English within a...

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