The English Language And Immigration - 18 December 1992

There was an Englishman name of EV Lucas who between the wars was just about the most popular essayist in Britain at a time when the essay was we can now see coming to the end of its 200-year-old vogue. He was Punch's regular film critic, he loved movies with a passion and he saw two or three, less than a week before he died. While he had the liveliest appreciation of American films, he had one or two quirky views about America itself, one of which was a fascination with American names. At one point, he noticed a at the time a very popular musician who'd gone from Vaudeville into the movies, one Art Fowler and I recall EV Lucas's comment, "Where do Americans get their Christian names from?"

Well apart from the fact worth noting that Americans don't have or as we would then have said haven't got Christian names since an awful lot of them aren't even nominal Christians, everybody has a first name but, as I say, apart from that it plainly had never crossed Mr Lucas's mind that Art was a nickname for Arthur, a small point but it indicated a very insular and at the time a very common view of America and Americans, which expressed itself most often in a prejudice in favour of American actors and actresses with English names. This with Mr Lucas was such a natural deep-seated prejudice that I doubt he knew he had it, but he would occasionally reveal it when he came on a talent on like, like I remember Caesar Romero, 'Caesar', whoever christened him 'Caesar'? This assumption that Americans with non English names are somehow not real Americans is an exclusively English idea, but it's still alive though among a fast dwindling and ageing generation of Britons.

I have an English friend in New York in his 60s, lived here most of his life, he's so consciously English that he makes a point of saying things like "tinned fruit" and "the underground" and "lift" and, of course, "Christian names". He just now visited a friend in a New York hospital and he came away in amazement, the whole place, he said, is staffed by foreigners. This amazed me until I visited the place and, as a reporter mind you, checked on this extremely unlikely fact. It turned out that in a staff of say 500, only 4% were not American citizens, they were either on their way to becoming such or had the necessary green card to qualify for permanent work as resident aliens.

It's true that from the admission centre to the various testing areas and the patient's floors, the place was a well disciplined babble or babel of accidents. The minority whether on top – surgeons, internists – or below nurses, aides, students – the minority spoke American English as their native tongue. The vast majority had come to it as a second language. In other words, here was a compact polyglot society of some native Americans in the old sense, white and black, but mainly Poles, Barbadians, Jamaicans, Colombians, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Indians from India, Hong Kong Chinese, one nurse from Manchester and one Scotswoman the tankers in a foreign sea.

This is nothing new but, for some reason I can't discover, it's striking old-line Americans, suddenly striking them all of a heap. We all know the figures in our heads, I've been quoting them updating them for several years, by 2000 AD only eight years from now, California – 52% of the people in that the most populous state in the union will be brown or black and of that majority, the fastest growing ethnic group is Asian. We're no longer allowed to call anybody Oriental, when they become citizens they will be known as Asian Americans just as increasingly I regret to say blacks are no longer to be called or written about as blacks but as African Americans.

This makes me wonder whether, by way of reactionary protest, I shouldn't start a movement to have me and my kind called Anglo Americans and go back to the old hyphenated forms German, American, Italian American etc, the hyphenated forms, which the redoubtable Theodore Roosevelt swore must be expunged, driven from the language because it was his idea the duty of every immigrant, if he wanted to lift himself from the pool of cheap immigrant labour, he must learn English. Teddy Roosevelt said this, he made a crusade of saying it at a time when the first great tide of southern and central European immigrants was flooding the eastern ports. Roosevelt saw the English language as the one sure lifeline between all these foreign-speaking hordes, the one sure guarantee of a United States.

There is today a society; it's called US English devoted to the idea that English should be declared ideally in a constitutional amendment to be the official language of the United States. Several states have already adopted such a declaration and have run into a heap of trouble because you then have to specify all the occasions when a foreign speaker may constitutionally use his native tongue, business deals in the courts especially, but this movement is getting nowhere with the people who could give force to it, namely the Congress for the simple but very powerful reason that no man running for the Senate or the House in a State with a sizeable Hispanic or Asian or mixed immigrant vote is going to alienate it at the start by seeming to discriminate by seeming to threaten a disability against the people who don't yet speak English.

Oddly, when this requirement is put to Americans their overwhelmingly for it. I see from a national survey taken only a week ago that when asked ought new immigrants to learn English, the response across the whole country is over 95%. Yet, politicians run a mile when that amendment is mentioned to declare English the official language of the United States they duck what is becoming an immense social problem, the problem of conducting more and more business in trials, in council meetings, in citizens and parent groups, the business of having to have interpreters on hand to handle debates or hearings in two or more languages.

Quebec stands out up there to the north as a prime and disturbing example of the sheer cost of maintaining more than one official language and having to print everything from a bill of divorcement to a no smoking sign, a cigarette package, a theatre ticket in two languages.

Well, as I was saying, we all know the statistics of the growing shall we say darkening of the average American, but it takes something more immediate, more trivial than a national poll to bring it home to some of us with a bang. Witness a small comic but significant incident that happened recently to an American senator, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. "I pick up the telephone and call the local garage," he said on the Senate floor last June, "I can't understand the person on the other end of the line, I'm not sure he can understand me. They're all over the place and they don't speak English, do we want more of that?"

Now Senator Byrd is not just any senator, he's the majority leader, the Democrats headman in the Senate, he's chairman of one committee and a powerful figure on others, maybe the Senate Sub-Committee on Immigration and Naturalisation I don't know – isn't it very late in the day for the senator to be discovering one of the more glaring facts of American life? The answer is yes, but it's one of those facts that you'd rather not hear about, which doesn't come alive until it happens to you.

Well, as I say, its apparently been happening to a lot and a wide variety of Americans, for now this year there is a rumble, the ground swell of a new movement a move to freeze or severely limit immigration. At various times in American history this alarming movement has stirred as surely as California's San Andreas fault. Not long after the American Revolution and the founding of a new nation, the country was hit by a panic fear of spies, foreign agents, subversives it was expressed in a shameful code of repressive laws called the Alien and Sedition Acts.

In the 1850s when the Irish came roaring in and in the 1890s when the first flood from central and southern Europe washed over New York City, the Congress rushed to ban Orientals altogether to increase the quotas for northern Europeans, English, Scots, Scandinavians, Germans, but to limit drastically the entry of what some Congressmen called less desirable immigrants meaning Czechs, Hungarians, Russians, Romanians, Poles and though the law never dared specify, Jews in general.

After the First World War, there was another epidemic of chauvinism and after the Second War an act repealed only a year ago that tried to maintain the heavily preferential quotas for northern Europeans, but the last move Congress made on the subject was only two years ago when it increased all immigrant quotas by 40%. You'll have gathered from this quick historical sketch that the instigators of all such prejudicial – we might say bigoted – legislation were senators and congressmen of English or Scandinavian or Scots, Irish origins, say, conservatives in general.

But this time round, the forces of reaction's spanned the political gamut – old-lime Anglos. of course, but environmentalists, who fear the immigrant population explosion will ruin the conditions of living, blacks who see their jobs and their little political power being taken from them by smart Asians, most surprisingly liberal Democrats. The former presidential candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy has written a blast of a book called A Colony of the World in which he contends that the present immigration policy is making the United States a land where all sorts of ethnic groups – he means foreigners – feel entitled to live, so I doubt whether for some time your going to hear much more about the melting pot and the famous line on the Statue of Liberty – "give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses" – may be quoted in Congress but with a groan. The fact that unlimited immigration is already draining government's resources, overcrowding and fattening the city ghettos and importing millions of the unskilled for whom unskilled jobs are fading fast – all this is echoed by that line of Senator Byrd's, which could become a bit of American folklore, a cry from the heart, "they're all over the place".

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