Hablo Inglés

“Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English —- they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your children can speak Spanish”, so spake Obama, explication with refinements upon request.

Another signature Barack Knows Best moment and the now familiar scolding tone and sanguine assurances. The deliberate and duplicitous conflation of issues would have you thinking this has something to do with the virtues of speaking more than one language. Precisely wrong. It has everything to do with speaking the English language.

Putting aside the “other” issues the question is not only whether millions of illegal immigrants can learn English but whether they will (press one if you wish the national conversation about English to continue in English). If they don’t it can only divide and diminish this nation.

To assert “they’ll learn English” is characteristically arrogant and asinine. Many are functionally illiterate in their native language. A small but significant impediment to the acquisition of a second language.

I would remind the Junior Senator that a frightful number of his fellow Americans can’t speak a correct English (Ebonics doesn’t count), write a coherent sentence or decipher a bus schedule, let alone an editorial. This after twelve years of primary education and the Internet. They remain an intractable “underclass”. Coincidence?

Language, the English language this being the United States, remains the best measure of and means to one’s betterment.