What The Hell America!

DONALD TRUMP’S SECOND TERM has been so chaotic that some damaging new policies have slipped by too quickly to be widely noticed. Case in point: Earlier this month, Trump issued an executive order purporting to designate English as the “official language of the United States.” This move understandably received far less public attention than other more egregious administration actions—but it is still worth taking a moment to reflect on what it means.

The executive order allows government agencies to decide for themselves whether to offer documents and services in multiple languages, implicitly encouraging them to limit those communications to English alone. It revokes a Clinton-era executive order that required government agencies to assure that their documents and services were accessible to non-English speakers.

In an important sense, Trump’s executive order is only symbolic. There are plenty of cases in which the federal government is required by law to offer services or information in multiple languages; this executive order does not affect those cases. It applies only to situations in which the executive branch has discretion. And because any executive order can be revoked by a subsequent executive order, any future president can with the stroke of a pen undo Trump’s designation of English as the official language.

Still, the executive order is a win for the English-only movement, which advocates limiting immigration and bilingual education. And it fits in with Trump’s other hostile-to-immigrants policies.

Speaking as an educator with over fifty years of experience as an English-as-a-second language teacher, teacher educator, and evaluator working across the globe, Trump’s order is divisive, unnecessary and cruel.

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A White House fact sheet about the order claims that making English the official language “promotes unity, establishes efficiency in government operations, and creates a pathway for civic engagement.” None of this is true. Instead, the order threatens the availability of multilingual resources that families depend on to live productively in the United States. Envision, for example, trying to understand healthcare forms and legal documents, let alone filing taxes, studying for citizenship, or voting without materials in a language you understand.

Moreover, the United States has always been multilingual, and we have always been a nation of immigrants. In colonial times English-speaking majority lived alongside sizable populations of French, German, and Dutch speakers—not to mention the numerous Native American languages such as Navajo, Yupik, Sioux, and Cherokee. Subsequent waves of immigration from around the globe brought speakers of almost every language to our shores. Of the roughly 350 languages spoken in the United States besides English, the most common are Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, and Vietnamese.

The jingoistic call to a supposed English-only tradition contradicts the understanding that undergirded our new country. The Founders grasped the importance of linguistic pluralism and the constitutional principles of liberty and equality. True, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are written in English; but nowhere did the Founders proclaim English as our official language.

The English language does not need federal protection. It indisputably remains the dominant language of the United States. An English-only directive—which, again, Trump’s executive order doesn’t quite succeed in being—would erect even more hurdles to immigrant families already under significant stress as they seek employment and housing, raise their children, help them succeed in school, find transportation, and access services such as health care and legal aid.

WHILE STUDYING FOR MY DOCTORATE in education at Teachers College, Columbia University, I taught English as second language to adult immigrants at LaGuardia Community College in New York City. My students worked hard to master English, and I can’t remember one that didn’t want to speak English fluently. But many worked multiple jobs and cared for children, causing them to miss classes. And many were not literate in their first language—making it extremely difficult to become English-proficient. Adding English proficiency as a prerequisite to civic participation is a gratuitous burden to those who are already struggling to make ends meet.

And what about the benefits of having a multilingual nation in an increasingly global world? The United States is language-rich—one in five Americans speak a language other than English. Multilingual individuals are sought after in the workplace. Customer service, health care, business, finance, and hospitality industries need bilingual employees, and these workers earn considerably more than their monolingual counterparts.

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Moreover, English-language learners comprise one of the fastest growing groups in our nation’s public schools. When I did my doctoral research on English-language learners while working with K-12 teachers, we learned from research and experience that the pathway to English-language proficiency was most often through a child’s mother tongue.

Bilingual programs allow students to either maintain their mother tongue as they learn English or use their mother tongue to transition to English. Students who graduate from bilingual programs speaking two languages display more cognitive flexibility—the brain’s ability to adapt to new information—than their monolingual peers. And in places where bilingual programs are not offered or are impractical, it is important that teachers have training and resources to make science, math, and social studies comprehensible to their students, thus allowing them to use their mother tongue to learn content.

Finally, Trump’s executive order conveys the wrongheaded and divisive idea that English is superior to other languages. It may have a chilling effect on students’ pride in their mother tongue and heritage, and on teachers’ inclination to celebrate their students’ languages and cultures. We run the risk of squandering the multilingual resources that our K-12 students represent.

Because Trump’s official-English executive order is limited in scope, and because a future president can revoke it, it’s possible that its effects will be minimal. But to the extent that the executive order’s effects will be felt at all, the result won’t be greater “unity” and a “unified” society, but rather division, confusion, and harm.