…Because the Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference is just too played out.
This woman wrote a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle–remember that part about how she lives in San Francisco–about how she is being made to feel like a foreign alien outsider in her own goddamn country. No, not by knowing that small amounts of the taxes she pays to her government may go to support those people and their holiday parades and their ER visits and their third-graders and their workers’ comp claims and their leisurely strolls down American sidewalks and the 1040EZ forms they walk right into our libraries to take. Not by having to live or work with them. Not by having to wonder if maybe they’re only refusing to speak English so they can say nasty things about her.
No, this is even worse. Multilingual answering services! The bastards!
(Scroll down to letter number three:)
My hat’s off to Kathleen Parker, regarding her April 6 column “English spoken here.” I beg to differ on her observation that one has to “press two” for Spanish. Increasingly I find that I have to press 1 to speak English — in my own country, by U.S.-owned companies.
How dare they not default to her language! How dare they not assume that everyone who calls is an English speaker unless informed otherwise! How dare they remind her that not all their customers are like her! How dare they relegate English to a language like other languages! How dare they force her to press a button! The outrage!
Aside from any immigration issue, I find that offensive.
…Yeah, I don’t get the sense that this is just about immigration, either.
I fully encourage companies to offer great customer service by offering alternative language services — emphasis on alternative.
“If you’re a genuine English-speaking American, thank you for your call and please hold; a customer-service representative will be with you shortly. If you’re one of those people, and you need us to speak some other language, press two now. That’s two, for some language other than English. If you need special assistance, maybe you should consider going back where you came from.”
Jim Caviezel wept.
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They deny that the ugly racist feelings in them even exist and all the while fearing that they might be on the receiving end of them, they attack things like having a spanish option on a call recording.
oh for a little self-awareness and compassion.
Speaking as a Canadian: Oy.
My mom is, I’m sad to say, one of those people. She gets all worked up into a tizzy about how when she goes to an ATM, she has to choose which language she’d like to use.
Oy indeed.
Oh, the horror! You know if you go to Europe the ATMs give you at least a choice of English, French, Spanish, and Italian, sometimes more. I would go on, but I am likely to faint dead away from the effort required to press one extra button. *swoon*
Personally, I favor having the option to hear the message in Dine, Hopi, and Zuni. No sense letting latecomers like the English and Spanish get the idea that they own the place.
Funny–same gist in a much less well written letter in my local Reno paper:
http://news.rgj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060410/OPED02/604100333/1100/OPED
Talking point? Seems pretty minor to be an actual direction but you never know.
This screams comparative worth.
Other people should have to learn an entire language the instant they get here so she doesn’t have to press one more button when she calls a company.
Lazy bitch.
You know what I think is hilarious? That she’s fixated on pressing one button to get to the English-language menu, rather than the fact that after that, she’s going to have to listen to five more menus and press five more buttons and then spend the next 45 minutes on hold before she can finally talk to an operator who may or may not be able to explain why there’s a mysterious $25 charge on her phone bill. I mean, seriously. She thinks the big problem with the customer-service phone trees is that they have a Spanish option? That’s the only thing about them that *is* at all user-friendly.
Have you ever noticed that a lot of xenophobes are dingbats?
As a woman who grew up learning about tolerance and diversity and the bygone era of the civil rights movement before which people were racist (but now they’re not), I have found myself increasingly disillusioned by the people i meet. The utter hatred is there, seething, just under the surface.
I go to Berkeley, and today there was a massive Immigrants Rights rally (that kind of got fused with a pro-Palestine rally). Most people were out there supporting full and equal human rights for all immigrants, but the white, mostly male college Republicans showed up.
One guy had a sign that said, “Hable Ingles, Por Favor.” I and another went up to talk to him. He tried his darndest to say he wasn’t against immigration, and he even tried to co-opt being against the exploitation of migrant workers, but at the same time, he went on and on about how the Mexicans have to take responsibility for the economic situation of their country, and he could not wrap his mind around the fact that our foreign policies contribute to their poverty and their need to migrate. His response to that? “I don’t think the US is all-powerful and can just dictate who gets to be poor.” Plus, he was carrying a racist sign.
They were all carrying signs like that, nad the venom and the hatred was just under the surface. One girl held a sign that said, “Mr. Bush, Build That Wall!” I asked her, “Who do you think is going to build the wall if not Mexican migrant workers?” She said Americans, “with the tax money we save from not paying for illegals.” She said, “We don’t need illegals. That’s the whole point. We don’t need their work or them, and we can’t assimilate them all anyway.” She stopped short of saying that we should send them all home (apparently with the check we’re not going to have to fill out for “The Illegals”), but the message was clear: go home, we don’t want your kind here.
The other signs were pretty terrible, like “Good Walls Make Good Neighbors” and “Being Here Is a Privilege.” I guess they earned the privilege by being born white. I would say that the immigrants who risk their lives running through the desert to escape abject poverty and to build a better life for themselves earned the privilege far more than naive children from white Republican families, but racism is the antithesis of merit.
I’m proud of myself and my classmates for holding up flags from over twenty countries and screaming, in Spanish, English, and other languages, “We want a country without borders!”
Quieremos el mundo sin fronteras!
And my favourite anarcho-internationalist slogan: there are no illegal immigrants, only illegal governments.
I’m so glad I’m not like them, it makes my life so much more fun. The other day I called a girl back (she left a message about renting my place) and he message was in four, count ‘em, FOUR languages. I swooned a little.
Oxymoron-lovers unite!
Idiot. Mundo means world. Pais means country.
Well, that was a bit uncalled for.
You are right. I meant world, and it does make no sense with ‘country.’ Next time I will proofread and leave Spanish to the Spanish-speakers.
My maternal grandparents and kin showed up speaking no English. As a consequence, new immigrants, even in small towns ghettoized themselves until they could learn the language. Many shopkeepers were multi-lingual or hired employees that were. In the era of electronic communications and high mobility this strategy won’t work. There is a huge influx of Spanish speaking immigrants. The best way to not integrate them is to deny them some kind of support structure(s).
I don’t not want this to become a bi-lingual country like Canada. If you want to live here you should learn English. It is the current lingua franca of the world and it is doing kids a disserve to keep it from them. However, this doesn’t happen over night. Push the damn button and quit bitching!
Only because Americans are too lazy to learn anything else and the rest of the world caters to our stupidity in order to keep the cash flowing.
Seriously — the state of language education in the US is a joke.
LS, you beat me. In other nations, people are expected to know multiple languages. People like this are downright embarrassing. And in San Francisco, where you hear all kinds of languages just walking down the street? This person must never leave the house. Or she lives in the Marina.*
*I tease, I tease, Marina-residents who may be reading this. It’s done with love.
Hell, most of the United States resents the idea of taking English classes.
Oh, I wasn’t referring to you. Your sentence was correct. I was talking about Tuomas’s mistranslation. (He’s got something of a reputation here.)
Sorry for the miscommunication!
Yes, I evilly mistranslated:
“We want a country without borders!”
as
“We want a country without borders!”
I don’t speak Spanish, and I have no intention to learn (If I were to learn a new language at my age, I’d choose Russian, hands down).
Blah. I will try and be more careful about insulting people.
The Spanish is correct. The original’s a typo.
Is that an apology of sorts (for calling me an idiot), or just an apology to Sierra?
Of course Sierra’s comment makes lot more sense with “We want a world without borders!”, even though I personally oppose pretty much every meme she (?) mentioned (being Pro-Israel, and wanting to live in a world with borders. Independent nation-states have borders, you know.). And if “Hable Ingles, Por Favor”, is what she calls a racist sign (and I thought she said people aren’t racist now?), then the standard for calling something racist is set unreasonably low (well, they do say that a racist is someone who won an argument with a liberal…).
That, or Sierra is clever parody. ;)
That is, I apologize for snarking on what might just be a simple typo, from Sierra.
I was skimming and totally missed the “country without borders” in the original. I thought you’d mistranslated the Spanish via Altavista or something. #19 is an apology to Sierra. #21 is for you.
Okay, thanks.
Tuomas, you don’t need to learn a language to get the gist of the Spanish sentence. Both mundo and frontieras are built on common Latin roots. Do you know the word mundane? Same root as mundo, meaning worldly. Ever heard of an organisation called Médecins sans Frontièrs?
Etymology makes your life so much easier, as long as you’re dealing with Indo-European languages.
Therese:
You are right. I’m not a native Indo-European language speaker, thus I’m not as aware of etymological issues.
However, nothing in Sierra’s post #10 indicates that “We want a country without borders!” was provided just as a translation to “Quieremos el mundo sin fronteras!”, until she clarified that later (#14).
The first post implies (by stating so directly) that they were chanting “We want a country without borders!”, and provides the “Quieremos el mundo sin fronteras!” as an inclusive afternote. Perhaps it was unintentional, but I tend to be literal-minded.
Correction: not a native speaker of language with roots in Latin (whatever the fine term was for that…).
What is your native language Tuomas?
I grew up in the midwest and one thing I love about the town I live in now in the northeast, although sadly devoid of black culture, is full of immigrants from all over the world and many second and third generation from many countries who still speak their native language.
I find it fascinating. How someone could not want to learn any way possible to communicate with as many people as possible is beyond me. Adults have a hard time learning a new language, their children often act as their translators and by virtue of school and socialization, learn english very well.
That some white americans get all bent sideways when non-english speakers exclude them from communication by speaking another language is another example in my mind of how white folks’ priviledge and position is challenged everyday. Of course they don’t like it, takes away their little power haven, leaves them feeling ignorant and foolish. White folks just don’t like that shit. But they protest in vain.
Finnish.
Personally I actually like the fact that English is the lingua franca of the world, it’s simple that way (as people speak their own language, and English). To me, that increases communication between people of different cultures (yet preserving their specialness). Besides, I very much doubt that my language will spread any day soon.
I can not understand the logic of people who think that immigrants are entitled to get everything in the language they were born with, that immigrants should not learn the language of the country they are moving into. That IMO speaks of entitlement as much as anything white folks do.
I suspect that’s because you cannot understand what it’s like to live in a country that assumes that immigration is a good, healthy, and important thing. If you’re going to have immigration, and if you’re going to give immigrants and their children a real chance of succeeding in the society, you need to accomodate the fact that it’s really hard for members of the immigrant generation to acquire a new language.
The overwhelming majority of immigrants to the U.S. would like to speak English, because it’s a prerequisite for full inclusion in the society. It’s just a myth that immigrants walk around contemptuously scoffing at English and planning to raise their kids to be monolingual Polish speakers who are confined to tiny Polish-American enclaves. And indeed, pretty much everyone who is born in the U.S. or moves here as a small child speaks English. Parents who want their kids to speak their birth language want them to speak it on top of, not instead of English.
The thing is that there are a lot of forces working against them: it’s hard to become fluent in a new language as an adult, many new immigrants work very long hours and don’t have time for classes, all low-income Americans face an acute childcare shortage that makes things like taking language classes difficult, and many immigrants don’t have a lot of opportunity to interact and socialize with English-speakers. All of this stuff is amplified for illegal immigrants. I think it’s really important to try to counteract the forces that make it difficult for immigrants to learn English, but we need to realize that even in the best case scenario, it’s going to take a lot of time.
So the question is whether you isolate members of the immigrant generation who have not fully learned English or whether you make moves to accomodate them. Do you allow them to use banks and set up retirement accounts, or do you force them to put their money under the bed? Do you make it possible for them to call the police when they’ve been victims of a crime, or do you either make them totally vulnerable or force them to develop a justice system outside of the legal one? Do you explain to them, in a way they can understand, that their fourteen-year-old son needs to start planning now if he’s going to take classes that will make him eligible for college, or do you figure that a parent who can’t understand doesn’t need to know? I believe that it’s much better for the society if you do everything possible to allow immigrants to participate as fully as possible in the political, social, and economic life of the country. I believe that immigrants’ children end up much more successfully integrated into the society if their parents’ linguistic needs are met.
Why not? Multilingualism (or even bilingualism) increases the number of people you can communicate with and knowing another language is fun. Any person of normal intelligence can learn at least two languages, especially if they are exposed to both languages as children and even adults can do it if they use immersion. What’s the downside?
You know what’s really funny?
The US does not have an official language. Nope, not even English.
Multilingualism in society:
Assuming the number of people you have contact with remains the same, it decreases the number of people you can communicate with.
Invidual multilingualism (learning new languages):
Increases, and is fun. Assuming the person learning has any talent/interest for learning new languages.
That is fun.
How is the solution for this providing services in languages other than English? I’d think that these kind of structural problems would require direct action instead of the band-aid like surrender.
I’m very unsympathetic to illegal immigrants, btw. There are probably literally billions of people who would like to come to U.S or Europe, and I see no reason that those who decide that they are more ’special’ and entitled (and can break existing immigration laws) should be treated as anything else than selfish criminals that they are.
You need to work on your reading comprehension. As I said, I believe we need to make it easier for immigrants to learn English. I also know that language acquisition takes time, even under ideal circumstances, and that in the meantime, it is better for immigrants and for the rest of us if immigrants can work, go to the doctor, communicate with the police, and otherwise function in society.
sympathies?
My grandmother was an illegal immigrant. I suppose you might call her a “selfish criminal.” I think of her as a desperate person trying everything she could think to do to survive. Had she not entered the U.S. illegally, she would almost certainly have died at Auschwitz, the way her mother and brother did. Maybe you think that’s what she should have done. But I think that it’s pretty easy to judge other people when you’ve never had to worry about food or shelter or whether you’ll be able to send your kids to school or whether your government is going to decide it’s a good idea to kill you. I think if it were me, I would make feeding my kids a higher priority than following U.S. immigration law. I’m glad that’s not a choice I’m ever likely to have to make.
Well, to be fair to Tuomas, I believe English is not his first language (he’s a Finn).
I’ll be honest, I have no idea of the legality of my ancestors’ entrance into the US. My father’s family were all potato-famine Irish, which says to me that they just booked passage and moved here, probably prior to the imposition of any controls on immigration. On my mother’s side, it was all great-grandparents, her mother’s mother came over at age 11 with her older brother, likely not entirely legally. Her father’s parents were from a landed family in Ireland, so they probably had the resources to go through channels.
Basically, I just assume that because of the time and the fact that we weren’t Chinese, nobody gave a crap and legality was eventually achieved.
I realize that, but the police, doctor etc. need to learn the language too, and some are incapable. Is it fair for them?
I’m sorry, I didn’t know that. When you look at the invidual, the stories are frequently heart-breaking. My grandparents were refugees in their own country, having had brothers, friends and relatives killed, homes bombed, and lands stolen. The shadow of WW2 and Holocaust hangs on many of our roots.
I will still maintain my position that the solution should be done legally. I’m sure there are heartbreaking stories of people who respected the law and thus suffered, having had their place taken up by someone who was less needing but more willing to break the law.
Well, the cops don’t get hired and the doctors don’t get through med school without learning English. Their second language is very helpful, but they won’t get the job in the first place if they’re not at least proficient enough to deal with their superiors and other professionals, such as pharmacists and district attorneys.
I used to work at a law firm where one of the secretaries was a nuclear engineer from Russia who could speak enough English to do that job (or, at least, was able to transcribe well enough), but didn’t have enough English to get a job in engineering.
I didn’t mean English, I meant the language (in this case Spanish) they would be using when providing the services to immigrants.
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