A fear of Spanish

In yesterday’s New York Times, Sam Roberts wrote a piece titled "In a Generation, Minorities May Be the U.S. Majority." Nothing grabs people’s attention like the threat of foreign invasion.

The Census Bureau projects that by 2050, there will be more non-whites in the U.S. than whites. The cause is not an increase in immigrants, but higher birth rates among immigrants.

For some reason, this drives people crazy. Personally, I don’t believe that the average American is too racist to deal with a non-white majority. (This could be true though; I’m just giving people the benefit of the doubt.) Instead, I think they’re just afraid that Spanish will become the official language of the United States.

And really, who wants to learn a foreign language?

Of course, I doubt the U.S. will ever be a Spanish-dominated country. Sure, you can push the number 2 on your touch-tone phone for a Spanish menu, but this is an accommodation, not a linguistic takeover. Everybody calm down.

This prediction by the Census Bureau supports my point. We’ll see an increase in immigrant births rather than aliens. Minorities born, raised, and educated in the United States learn English. They want to and, more importantly, have to. This should be compelling reason to naturalize immigrants and give them a fair place in our school system.

Somewhat ironically, the same folks who fear the immigrant population most are also the same people attempting to limit their upward mobility. Much of it has to do with the way articles like this are phrased, which I can’t stand. Even by these projections, whites will still make up 46% of the country, with the Hispanic population at 30%. I think it’s misleading to lump all minorities into a single category, because what that’s really saying is "non-whites will outnumber whites."

God forbid!

That, to me, is the most compelling evidence that people are still very uncomfortable with a little ethnic diversity.