Nathan Moore's Thoughts
English Lessons from Green Bay
The city of Green Bay (population 102,313) is one of the largest cities to have passed an English language amendment. It did so in 2002. Since 2000, Brown County, the county where Green Bay is located, has seen an increase of 30% in non-native English speaking immigrants
The number of people in Brown County whose native language is something other than English has increased nearly 30 percent since 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
While a growing percentage of those people report that they speak English “very well,” the actual number whose English skills are worse is going up, according to the Census.
The population of people who need help with reading, writing and speaking English continues to outstrip the Literacy Council’s ability to help them with those skills, said Tori Rader, the agency’s executive director.
“The whole situation is not diminished,” she said. “We continue to see new immigrants coming. … We don’t have enough tutors. We still have 85 people waiting for tutors.”
This tells us two things. One, despite the sometimes assertions of those pushing the English Only amendment, such an amendment will not have an effect on non-English immigration (if non-English immigrants will keep moving to a place as intemperate as Green Bay, Nashville is a no-brainer). Second, it also counters the erroneous belief that non-English speaking immigrants are coming here with no desire to speak English.
Green Bay needs more tutors. In their resolution in 2002, they even requested more state and federal funds for them. The English Only crowd in Nashville needs to be told you cannot assimilate immigrants at the point of a legal bayonet.download henry poole is here
January 12th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Paging Donna Locke. Donna? You there?
January 12th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
[...] Moore, an English Only opponent and a “keen conservative legal mind”, digs up some pertinent info from Green Bay, Wisconsin, one of the bigger cities to have passed an English [...]
January 14th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Speaking for myself, pellaboy, and not for Crafton or others: One of the objectives of the immigration-control movement is to hit as many accommodations/magnets to illegal immigration and loose legal immigration as possible. We know that the federally imposed magnets are crucial and are tying up Americans with their own dress sash, negating to great degree our efforts at the state and local levels, but it is foolish, shortsighted, and gutless to sit back and do nothing when some things are in our power to change and/or preserve. If Americans do this in every community and state, it will have powerful effect.
And it is wrong to hold Americans fiscally responsible for the consequences of corrupt foreign and domestic government policies that most of us oppose to begin with, according to polls. We have a right to rebel against this in every way we can. As for the people caught in the middle, I have no sympathy for the people who are here in violation of our laws — they are thieves. As for the legal immigrants, we are not supposed to be fiscally responsible for or burdened by these people, as our immigration laws are or were written. Read the mention I made in a comment to another post, about the affidavit of support for legal immigrants.
As for refugees and asylees, let private charities (many of which get our tax dollars under faith-based-initiative and other programs many of us oppose) and some educational programs that we shouldn’t allow to grow exponentially year by year take care of these folks’ assimilation problems. If we are changing our country to suit these folks — and we are — then it means we are taking in too many.
January 16th, 2009 at 12:43 am
Donna, if you could prove that immigrants are costing us money (more money than they bring in), I might agree with your argument. But I doubt that you could make that case. Our immigrants contribute more to the economy than they take out of it in services. They come here to work, and they do. They work hard, and the vast majority of them live peacefully and lawfully as good neighbors.
I just don’t think that immigration is the “problem” that you and the other FAIR people think it is.
You don’t have the statistics on your side. You can make stuff up, but that doesn’t make it true.