English Is Broken Here (1996)

California's Yuba County is getting ready to spend $12,000 this November on election materials that nobody will use. That's because the federal government forces local officials to print voting information in Spanish for every election. Bilingual ballots are an enormous waste of county resources, says Frances Fairey, Yuba County's registrar of voters. last March's primary election, this county north of Sacramento was forced to spend $17,411 on Spanish-language election materials. But, according to Fairey, In my 16 years on this job, I have received only one request for Spanish literature from any of my constituents. The biggest problem with bilingual ballots, however, is not that they go unused in Yuba County, but that they are used in so many other places. Thousands of Americans are voting in foreign languages, even though naturalized citizens are required to know English. The National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium estimates, for instance, that 31 percent of Chinese-American voters in New York City and 14 percent in San Francisco used some form of bilingual assistance in the November 1994 elections. Though these figures may be overstated, proportions anywhere near this magnitude are devastating to democracy. As Boston University president John Silber noted in congressional testimony last April, bilingual ballots impose an unacceptable cost by degrading the very concept of the citizen to that of someone lost in a country whose public discourse is incomprehensible to him. A nation noted for its diversity needs certain instruments of unity to keep the pluribus from overrunning the unum. Our common citizenship is one such tool. Another, equally important, is the English language. It binds our multiethnic, multiracial, and multireligious society together. Not everyone need speak English all of the time, but it must be the lingua franca of civic life. Since the voting booth is one of the vital places in which citizens directly participate in democracy, it must be the official of the election process. It is not, however, and political jurisdictions ranging from Yuba County to New York City can pin this mess on the perversion of voting-rights legislation. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed blacks the right to vote in places, particularly the South, where they had been systematically blocked from electoral participation, often through the use of bogus But as Manhattan Institute scholar Abigail Thernstrom has shown in her comprehensive book Whose Votes Count?, it did not take long for this important piece of civil rights legislation to expand in dangerous ways. After the Act's passage in 1965, civil rights groups toiled to expand its authority. When the law came up for reauthorization in 1975, Hispanic organizations argued that English-language ballots were the equivalent of literacy tests. People whose first was Spanish needed special protections in order to vote, they claimed, citing low turnout among Hispanics. This was sheer quackery. Literacy tests in the South were used for the fraudulent purpose of keeping blacks away from elections. Low Hispanic turnout was mainly due to the fact that so many Hispanics were not citizens and therefore ineligible to vote. Nevertheless, Congress sided with the activists. It required bilingual ballots in any political district where language minorities made up at least 5 percent of the total population and less than half of the district's citizens were either registered to vote or had voted in the 1972 presidential election. It also required that bilingual election materials be made available to voters in every county in which the language-minority population had an illiteracy rate -- meaning failure to complete the 5th grade, a trait that includes many immigrants--above the national average. Interestingly, language minorities were not defined by (a cultural characteristic), but by ancestry (a genetic one). …