Mythology and Its Injustice to Immigration by Sam Hernandez March 2020
Part 3
Myth number 3: Today’s immigrants do not want to learn English. It is not true.
History shows that today’s non-white immigrants learn English slightly faster than the first white European immigrants who quit coming when the conditions in their home country improved.
The English came first, as colonized people of the British Empire, and succeeded in establishing “first power” and way of life in the first colonies. They instituted English as the present and future primary language. As other white European nations came, the colonies became populated with enclaves of white groups more comfortable in their own native culture and language, trying to retain their “self” while in transition to a new language and culture being built by the British elite and trade ship companies. It took them a long time to learn English, partly because they were starting their own businesses and work within themselves while trying to remain their own ethnic selves. Still, they were all white and European. They were no longer indentured and liked to see hard physical labor done by “others.” They were proud that they had eliminated the “inferior” Native Americans and embraced a legalized slavery in the South. Winning the Revolutionary War proved that they were white, proud and privileged, and had “melted” into “the pot” of one culture--all white.
Keeping one’s native culture, or not, does not seem to slow or speed up learning English. English is today’s most needed language for global trade and business. It still takes time to learn it. Everybody who came and now come to the U.S. wants and needs to learn English in order to live, work, and communicate with everyone. Then and now, the elders take about a generation (20-25 years) to learn English. The children and youth learn quicker because school is part of their day. The second generation becomes more English proficient. The third generation begins to even forget their first language as they “melt into the pot.” Some continue to try even after they find out they are not “meltable.” Learning English while living in enclaves and working daily is very difficult. For example, German immigration peaked in the 1860-1870’s. Three generations later, during the WWI period of 1917, there were still 700 German language newspapers available! Language is the essence and retainer of an ethnic culture. If you are not white, it is best to keep your language.
Learning English is a most serious undertaking. Are you learning English in the U.S. just because you need it to survive? To forget your native language and assimilate into a white non-ethnic “melting pot” culture where you find your ethnicity is “non-meltable” because of your color? To become bi- or multi-cultural so that you can live and work with different cultures and still be “you”?
The whites came already having had experience with elements of the start of the Industrial Revolution and wanted it here. To get it done, all white groups decided to forgo their similar ethnic cultures and accept one language. They had to forgo their family-extension systems in order to direct more of their time to the revolution of mechanized production and profitable labor. They became a “nuclear” family, responsible for only the parents and siblings. Other values were given up for those needed for success in the new non-ethnic “culture of the machine”: cyberculture. For example, they went from group to individual, from relationship orientation to task orientation, from cooperation to competition, and from “to be” to “to do.” It got them what they wanted--to become the most productive and richest nation in the world. It also made most of them white nationalists and racists. When non-whites do what it takes to “melt”, they are told that they have to do “one more thing” that they didn’t have to do: change their color. The “unmeltable” non-whites decide to either live on belonging neither to their original group nor to cyberculture; to become culture “floaters “or return to their former “selves”, remain or become bilingual, and have one group in which they can have equality. They often become mentors to the continually arriving non-English-dominant relatives who need their love, hope and direction.
Cyberculture has capitalism, nationalism and kleptocracy. Its inequities are hard on family extended or nuclear systems. Nuclear family is breaking down. Fragile families crumble into single-parent homes. Children are being raised by other than their parents. Seniors find their final years are often alone. The social ills of drugs, loneliness, poverty, depression and suicide keep rising. In 1960, 78% of the U.S. children lived in nuclear families. Today it is 48%. Many are directionless and ill-disciplined at home and in school. The world is in such turmoil that immigration will continue and most of them will be non-white. As always, they are needed.
