For new immigrants, the importance of learning English
English proficiency has economic, social and even health benefits
Maria is in her 30s and has a bashful, kind smile. She is originally from Peru and has been in the U.S., in New York City, only a few months. She barely speaks English.
I asked her in English where she lives. I could see from her expression the struggle to understand what I said. I said it again, this time a little slower, pronouncing my words more distinctly.
She replied, “Staten Island. I live in Staten Island." The others in our group were watching, listening intently.
“Staten Island?” I was surprised. I would soon learn that many new immigrants settle there because so much of the rest of the city has become unaffordable. “How do you get here from Staten Island?”
Again, the perplexed look.
“How do you go from Staten Island to here? By bus? Ferry? Subway?”
Slowly, at times grasping for the words to express herself, Maria (not her real name) told me her story. She gets up around 6 a.m. to take an express bus to Manhattan and then the subway to the Upper West Side where the Riverside Language Program. She takes an English language class all day with an hour break before lunch when she and the students form small groups to chat informally with volunteers like myself. When the class ends at 3 p.m., she takes the subway to a building in Midtown where she works from 4 p.m. until midnight cleaning offices. She gets home around 2 a.m. The next day, she does it again.
I asked Maria what she did in Peru.
"I was a psychologist," she said.
Citizenship ceremony, Los Angeles, May 2022, photo credit: Getty Images
About one million people immigrate legally to the United States each year. There are now 44 million foreign-born Americans, about 14% of the population and growing. California has the largest population of foreign immigrants.
"More than 40 percent of Californians speak a language other than English at home. About half of those do not speak English well, or at all," according to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. They live in what the U.S. Census Bureau calls "linguistic isolation," that is, where no one in the household over the age of 13 speaks English well. Extrapolating from the California figures, we are talking about millions of Americans unable to communicate in or understand English well.
The inability to speak English well has myriad social, economic, even health consequences. It restricts employment, educational and housing options. It can be a formidable barrier to full participation in the larger society.
Riverside Language Program, New York City, photo credit: RLP
"Your life is very limited when you don't have access to the language," said Berta Colon, executive director of Riverside Language Program, which provides free English instruction to non-English speaking immigrants. I can't tell you how many people have come in because they're stuck at that entry level (job) and they will have been told they will not have many more opportunities if they do not get greater command of the language."
"Adults who are not able to speak English well often have trouble talking to the people who provide social services and medical care. As a result they may not get the healthcare and information they need," according to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.
Michelangelo Landgrave of the Cato Institute wrote in 2019, "The ability to speak English is an important part of immigrant assimilation in the U.S. Aside from the influence on natives' attitudes toward immigrants, learning English correlate(s) with higher educational attainment, earnings, social assimilation and improved mental health."
Picture this. You're dropped into, let's say, Tashkent, Uzbekistan or Asuncion, Paraguay. You don't speak Uzbek or Spanish. You're there to stay. Where do you begin to find a home, work, open a bank account, enroll your children in school, buy food? How do you start a new life when you can't even say hello, much less ask directions to the store to buy a bottle of water?
It would be bewildering, intimidating, even frightening.
That is the reality for many new immigrants to the U.S. When I visited a Catholic Charities refugee respite center in McAllen, Texas last spring, I met immigrants newly and legally arrived from countries such as Mexico, Nicaragua, Cameroon, Haiti, China. Few of them could say much more than hello and thank you in English. They would soon be resettled all around the U.S. Strangers in a strange land, to borrow the title of a Robert Heinlein novel.
Riverside Language Program, New York City, photo credit: RLP
I wrote a few months ago about the stigma and biases attached to speaking English with a foreign accent, and the consequent effect on one's job and educational opportunities. If you can barely speak English, those consequences are magnified exponentially, as Maria, the psychologist who cleans desks, discovered.
Lynda Metmer, the office manager at Riverside, immigrated to the U.S from Algeria in 2019 and began taking English classes at Riverside which she'd heard about from a family member.
"Being in New York is a dream come true for me," she said. "However, when you move to a country that speaks another language than yours, it is difficult to integrate in a new life, community, culture. It was frustrating at the beginning because I was not able to communicate easily, hearing and being able to understand, not being able to get my thoughts and ideas understood."
Doris Athineos, who teaches beginner level students at Riverside, recounted a conversation between two of her students during lunch.
"A student told another student, when they got here they went to a shopping mall in New Jersey and they did not know how to ask, 'Where is the toilet?' Doris said. "They never learned that. They peed in their pants."
Colon told me, "My own 'ah hah' moment was hearing this individual during a small group meeting talk about how, until they learned the language, it was impossible to convey (her) personality. That was so striking to me, that even the way you represent yourself is completely altered by not being able to speak the language."
Until I started volunteer teaching English, I never realized -- I never gave it much thought really -- how difficult English is. As someone put it, "there are all these rules and then all these exceptions to rules." I never heard the expression phrasal verbs until one of my students, from Venezuela, asked me about them and how to understand them. A phrasal verb combines a verb with an adverb or preposition to create its own meaning. English is riddled with them, such as "go through," "pass over," "get over," "see about," "follow up," etc. etc. etc. And lots of them have shifting meanings depending on the context. I may go over my homework with my tutor. I may go over to my friend's house. I may go over the hill to get to the other side.
Then there's the way we native speakers slur and truncate our words and phrases. Gonna instead of going to. Whatcha instead of What are you. Gimme instead of give me. A student from Colombia once asked me whether she should be trying to learn correct English or English the way people actually speak. I thought about that, and finally said, "I'd say learn to speak it correctly first and then you can advance to speaking it badly like the rest of us."
Throw into the mix American slang which is constantly changing, accents, which can vary widely by region or socio-economic level, and the speed with which we speak. To a non-English speaker, an overheard conversation between two Americans is a cacophony of gibberish (come to think of it, it often sounds like a cacophony of gibberish even to me).
Organizations such as Riverside Language Program in New York and Building One Community in Stamford, Connecticut, where I used to volunteer, offer new immigrants classes to learn English, as well as legal, housing, employment and family counseling. When I asked my students why they were taking the class, invariably they would say to improve their employment opportunities. I met a young woman from Turkmenistan who wants to be a flight attendant. A woman from Cameroon who was a doctor in her country and wants to learn English so she can be a doctor here. A man from Bolivia who is a maintenance worker who just doesn't want to always be a maintenance worker. I met several Ukrainians who had fled the war there and just wanted to start over in America and learn the language. These kinds of services are badly needed throughout the country. It's not enough for us to just accept new immigrants and leave them to figure out how to fit in. They deserve the assistance to learn, grow and thrive in their new land, including learning the dominant language.
"English language use is a salient component of American identity ... a cultural symbol," wrote Carlos Garcia of San Jose State University, and Lucille Bass, of the University of Oklahoma in their 2007 paper, American Identity and Attitudes Toward English Language Policy Initiatives..
Landgrave, in his report for the Cato Institute, cited a poll claiming that 62% of Americans think recent immigrants do not learn English in a reasonable time frame. A 2018 Pew Institute poll said 26% of Americans say they sometimes or frequently come into contact with immigrants who speak little or no English and that that bothers them.
"Language is at the core of the policy debate over immigrants' impact on American culture" wrote Garcia and Bass. "Throughout the 20th century. The general trend in public opinion has been a growing negativity toward immigration." One that some politicians and candidates for elected office have not hesitated to exploit.
Many Americans have come to believe that the latest wave of immigrants is more resistant to learning English than past immigrants who were largely from Europe. Not true, according to Landgrave.
"English acquisition rates have increased over the last 100 years," he wrote. "Our analysis unambiguously shows that today's immigrants are more likely to learn English than immigrants in the beginning of the last century. Whatever complaints Americans have about current immigrants, they typically have English skills greater than our immigrant ancestors."
Riverside language students, photo credit: Riverside Language Program
Berta Colon told me a story about a woman from Russia who came to Riverside to improve her limited English. She was a shoe designer in her native country and was seeking work in that area. But she was terrified of being interviewed in English. She couldn't even schedule an interview out of fear. She went to Riverside, diligently attending the all-day sessions for months.
Colon said that today she works for a "pretty high fashion label."
cover photo credit: Getty Images
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