Horowitz: Census now requires record number of counties to provide language assistance for … American voters?

Justice Louis Brandeis, a son of German immigrant parents, explained that the most important manifestation of Americanization is when the immigrant “substitutes for his mother tongue, the English language as the common medium of speech.” Yet now, according to a counterintuitive formula of our Census law, a record number of counties must provide language assistance to voters who, by virtue of their naturalization requirements, should easily be proficient enough in English to fill out a ballot. The meaning of American citizenship has become so diminished that we are losing our identity.

On Wednesday, the Census Bureau announced that the number of jurisdictions required by section 203 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to supply language assistance programs for voters spiked 22.3% in just five years – from 263 in 2016 to 331 today. If nothing else, this is a measure of just how much unassimilable immigration we have experienced in such a short period of time, itself built upon decades’ worth of record immigration constantly reinforcing previous waves to ensure there is limited assimilation into the English language.

In order to trigger a VRA requirement, more than 5% or more than 10,000 of voting-age citizens in the county must be limited in English proficiency. A total of 24,244,810 voting-age citizens now live in these 331 jurisdictions, which include the entire states of California, Texas, and Florida.

The requirement means that these county boards of elections must publish all voter information and registration materials, which may include ballots, in a specified language based on the county’s unique immigrant population. Pursuant to the new Census, Dallas County, Texas, for example, will now be required to offer materials in Vietnamese in addition to Spanish and recruit poll workers who also speak the language.

This entire rule flies in the face of the messaging of the pro-mass migration movement, which claims the movement supports assimilation. We are not talking about green cards here. By definition, anyone who is voting should have gone through the naturalization process and would have to be proficient enough in English to at least understand the process and fill out the ballot, even if the new American citizen still has trouble speaking the language. In the press release, the Census noted that its goal is to “provide language assistance during elections for citizens who are unable to speak or understand English adequately enough to participate in the electoral process.” However, shouldn’t we all agree that if one’s proficiency in English is not even enough to enable him to “participate in the electoral process,” then he shouldn’t be voting? After all, how did he pass the citizenship test? A rudimentary level of proficiency should be enough to fill out a registration form and ballot in English.

This new Census data illuminates the broader problem with unbridled mass migration for decades without end. As of 2018, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, Census data show that 67.3 million residents speak a foreign language at home – more than one in five living in America! In seven states, the percentage of foreign language speakers is over 30%, and in California it’s 45%.

But it’s the momentum and trajectory that signify concerning trends for the prospects of Americanization. “Since 1980, the number who speak a foreign language at home grew nearly seven times faster than the number who speak only English at home,” wrote CIS researchers Karen Zeigler and Steven Camarota at the time. “Even since 2010, when the number speaking a foreign language at home was already very large, the number of foreign-language speakers increased more than twice as fast as that of English speakers.”

What is even more disquieting is that, according to CIS’ research of Census data, more than one-third of adults who speak a foreign language at home are U.S.-born (19.3 million people). This means we are not just observing a trend of new immigrants or native-born children who speak English well but use another language to converse with their immigrant parents. This is a salad-bowl dynamic, where the velocity of immigration has been so intense for so long, with new waves from the same parts of the world reinforcing the old ones, that there is no assimilation. A Migration Policy Institute report claims 77% of the millions of school-age children enrolled in “limited English proficient” programs are native-born.

What’s worse is that endless waves of illegal immigration are constantly reinforcing a reverse-Americanization dynamic within Hispanic communities. According to the latest monthly Current Population Survey (CPS), the immigrant population in October 2021 was 1.8 million more than 12 months before. Thus, as bottlenecks in the supply chain intensified from the lockdowns, immigration never slowed beyond a few months in 2020. Roughly 1 million, or more than 50%, of the entire growth came from illegal aliens!

Thus, illegal aliens now have the power to flood our country, get counted in the Census, remake our reapportionment maps and political representation, then determine which areas get bilingual ballots based on their population! Hasn’t the time come to stop discouraging English proficiency even among those becoming citizens and seeking to vote? Will Republicans pledge to repeal these laws and finally make English the official language if they take back Congress? Don’t hold your breath.

Those who truly support the values of immigration should champion the movement to restore the English language to its proper role in our society and not weaken its prominence to accommodate those who decline to assimilate. As Justice Brandeis said, an immigrant “must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done, will he possess the national consciousness of an American.” The problem is that the native-born governing elites of this country have themselves forgotten what it means to be an American, or worse, have disdained and repudiated that consciousness.