Mohammad, now 26, has been in America for nine years and works in an airline ground crew. He still dreams of going into television. You can't go anywhere in this country without reading and writing. The economy is changing so fast. Even as the immigrants of the 1990s bring an ever greater variety of languages to America, technological change is boosting the economic and social importance of learning English.
Immigrants realize it.
In many states, there are long waiting lists for adult English classes. Nobody knows better the value of English than someone who doesn't speak it. Yet the notion of an English dividend may be not to be apparent to native speakers. With the rush of new arrivals from Latin America and Asia, many native Americans fear English is being devalued and displaced, edged out by Spanish, Korean, or another imported immigrant tongue. The effort to pass a national law declaring English the official language reflects concern that America is sliding toward Babel.