Hispanics consider English key skill
Published 10:11 pm Thursday, November 29, 2007
LOS ANGELES — Manuel Pereda, 57, spent years studying English during the day and working as a dishwasher at night. His wife, Rosa, 54, practiced common phrases and constantly looked up words in a Spanish-English dictionary.
The more English the couple learned, they presumed, the better jobs they could earn and the more money they could send home to their families in Mexico. Still, despite more than three decades in the United States, the couple feels more comfortable in their native language, often speaking Spanish at home, at work and while doing errands in their Huntington Park neighborhood.
Their U.S.-born daughter, Damaris, 20, however, primarily speaks English with her friends, at college and at her seasonal job. She values her bilingualism but said growing up in the United States has made her more articulate in English than Spanish.
A Pew Hispanic Center study released Thursday based on survey data collected between 2002 and 2007 reports that in Hispanic families such as the Peredas, where Spanish is the dominant language among first-generation immigrants, English fluency increases across generations. By the third generation, Spanish has essentially faded into the background.
Hispanics also recognize that learning English is key to economic success, the study showed.
“The ability to speak English is a crucial skill for getting a good job and integrating into the wider society,” said D’Vera Cohn, a senior writer at the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan research organization that does not advocate immigration policy. “Language is a vehicle for assimilation.”
Though the findings echo the history of previous immigration waves in the U.S., experts said, they counter the widespread perception that Hispanic immigrants do not assimilate and that their large numbers are a threat to English.
“People get very upset about ‘Press 2 for Spanish,’ ” said University of California, Irvine sociology professor Ruben RumÂbaut. But “there is no way English is being threatened by immigrants. … The switch to English is taking place perhaps more rapidly than it has ever in American history.”
English fluency has long been at the center of the immigration debate. Around the U.S., language battles are being fought over school tests, storefront signs and local ballots.
According to the Pew report, which analyzed surveys with more than 14,000 Hispanic immigrants, 23 percent of adult first-generation Hispanics say they can carry on a conversation very well in English, compared to 88 percent in the second generation and 94 percent in the third. Mexicans are the least likely to say they speak English well.
According to the Pew study, immigrants are more likely to speak English very well if they are college-educated, arrived in the United States as children or spent many years here.
Groups who support controls on immigration and English-only initiatives say the federal government and U.S. companies are making it easy for Hispanic immigrants to continue speaking Spanish.
“The Pew study points to some of the long-term problems,” said Mark Krikorian, execÂutive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors conservative immigration policies. “One in eight American-born children of immigrants doesn’t speak English well. … And even the grandchildren of immigrants who arrived decades ago, 6 percent of them still don’t speak English well. That’s pretty bad news.”
