'Illegal' immigration is illegal. If it's already illegal, there's not much more you can do about it. It would cost extra money to train and hire more border guards and they'd still get through. Plus our idiot president doesn't want to do anything about it. And to keep with the nature of this forum, Spanish is a cool language.
Oh and another example of what Bill was saying- and also answers american nic's statement of why should I care: Arizona schools are among the nicest and most well funded I have encountered. Yet Arizona's schools consistently suffer from having some of the worst test scores and student performance in the nation. Why?
It is because they are trying to accomodate the Spanish speakers who refuse to speak English.
Illegal is, by definition, against the law. We should not be catering to the illegals; we should be deporting them! I suspect that the Hispanics who came here legally, and jumped through the hoops to get here, and in some cases became US citizens aren't too thrilled with the illegals either.
Lazar:
This is an English speaking country NOW. What it was 300 years ago isn't relevant. The Spanish people haven't conquered us yet, though sometimes that seems to be their intent. Keep in mind that many people think Americans are rude when we go abroad without speaking the host counties language. The Hispanics are even ruder when they come here without speaking English, since they're coming here to live, not just to visit.
Please, enough with the ranting about immigration of Spanish-speaking individuals, already... This is not much better than DJW's ranting about how the US is a "white nation", to bring up a similar example of something else which is also rather, well, inappropriate, for this given forum.
And anyways, there's no reason why individuals who are natively Spanish-speaking should be *forced* to speak English, in the US, one way or another, just because most of the population of the US may be primarily English-speaking, or because one may be natively English speaking, and not want to put in the effort to bother to learn Spanish, if you're in an area which has received many Spanish-speaking immigrants relatively recently.
Maybe...or it could be that because of the insistance of using English, the Hispanic kids do a poor job bringing the scores down, while the 'natives' have test scores that are just fine. And they don't 'refuse' to speak English. It's more that they either don't need English (and they live in a heavily Spanish-speaking area) or that people of those long-day, minimum wage jobs they don't have time and/or money to learn. Their kids probably speak English just fine.
BTW, I was adressing sw yank.
I really wonder myself about how much of this is *really* just about the legality aspect of immigration itself, and more about ethnic, racial, and class issues, in a veiled fashion. It seems awfully suspect that some seem to think that this is just oh so horrible, as a whole, while European immigration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was on a far larger scale than this, as a whole, much of which was also composed of people who did not natively speak English, was just fine in itself in retrospect.
None of it is about legality. It's just that some people think that they deserve a good education and healthcare system because of where they were born, while other people elsewhere don't count.
Of course none of it's actually about legality; legal matters are just an excuse, a pretext used by such individuals, of which we have a number of good examples above, right in this very thread, to try to justify their overall views about immigration from Spanish-speaking countries in general.
Travis we've been through this. Those immigrants came in legally. I am all for immigration, that's what the US is for. The US is a federation and a federation cannot run smoothly with multiple national languages.
So if the borders were opened up you wouldn't complain?
You guys sure can talk a lot considering you have no experience. Come to the Southwest, there's a reason it's an issue.
Like legality alone really makes *that* much of a difference in the long run as a whole. The bigger difference, though, is that most of those immigrants, with the primary exceptions being immigrants from Japan and China during that same period, were Europeans, whereas the immigrants being considered in this given case are not. As for the language thing, well, that applies just as much to said historical European immigrants as it does to Spanish-speaking immigrants today.