At right is the text of a letter from ProEnglish to Alabama Governor Bob Riley. Gov. Riley served in the U.S. House of Representatives before being elected governor in 2002:

Gov. Bob Riley

The Honorable Bob Riley
State Capitol
600 Dexter Ave.
Montgomery, Alabama 36130

Dear Governor Riley:
        In 2000 you joined ProEnglish and fourteen of your colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives to file an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Alexander v. Sandoval.
       The case involved Alabama's appeal of a federal court decision that said the state's policy of giving drivers license exams exclusively in English violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Our brief supported Alabama's right to have such a policy after the state adopted English as its official language by a 9-1 margin in a 1990 voter referendum.
       The Supreme Court ruled in Alabama's favor. But we were disappointed that, despite its victory, Alabama under then Governor Don Siegelman chose to continue the court ordered policy of giving drivers' license exams in languages other than English.
       Drivers who cannot read and understand English pose a serious danger to public safety. They cannot understand traffic signs and directions, nor can they read highway instructions and hazard warnings on trucks and other vehicles. And they cannot communicate with police or public safety personnel in the event of a traffic accident or other emergency.
       Moreover, accommodating foreign languages instead of expecting immigrants to learn English to assimilate and succeed in our society undermines our nation's linguistic unity and divides our country in harmful ways. The people of Alabama, having voted overwhelmingly to make English the official language, have every reason to expect their state government to enforce and give meaning to the laws they enact.
      For these reasons we respectfully urge you as the Governor of Alabama, to restore Alabama's policy of making its drivers license exams available exclusively in English. Thank you for your consideration of this request.

Sincerely,

K.C. McAlpin
Executive Director

National physicians' organization joins court challenge to EO 13166
     The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a highly respected national physicians' group has agreed to join ProEnglish as a co-plaintiff in a new lawsuit challenging the legality of EO 13166.
     The AAPS has been sharply critical of the Department of Health and Human Service's (HHS) proposed regulations for implementing EO 13166. The AAPS objects to the fact that the regulations intervene in the doctor-patient relationship by imposing third party judgments about how doctors should communicate with their non-English speaking patients. The AAPS also noted that by forcing doctors and medical providers to provide free translation services and making them responsible for translation errors, the government is adding enormous costs and risks to a health care system already in crisis.
     In a letter to HHS the AAPS warned that if the EO 13166 regulations were intended to aid non-English speaking patients, they were likely to be counter-productive because they would cause physicians to stop treating non-English patients due to the higher costs and greater risks involved.
     ProEnglish general counsel Barnaby Zall welcomed the development. "The AAPS decision to join ProEnglish as a co-plaintiff on behalf of its members across the nation is a big boost to our case. We are delighted to have them on board," Zall added.
     
Gov. Richardson gives Dem. Party State of the Union reply in Spanish.
  The Democratic Party unwittingly helped make the case for official English when they asked the nation's only Hispanic Governor, New Mexico's Governor Bill Richardson, to give one of the Party's official responses to President Bush's State of the Union address, entirely in Spanish.
     The English translation of Richardson's remarks that was posted on the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) website the day after the State of the Union contained an embarrassing gaffe. In discussing the president's proposal for dealing with illegal aliens by granting them a form of amnesty, the translation had Richardson saying "[The president's] initiative includes some positive points like Social Security benefits and some labor protection, but it does not help immigrant workers to obtain the golden dream: legalization and residency with impunity." Although a literally accurate translation of the Spanish word, a more correct and less awkward translation of his meaning in Spanish would have been "legalization and safe residency" or "legalization and permanent residency."
     In addition to this malapropism, the DNC's English translation contained several other grammatical and translation errors, sometimes with subtle and perhaps deliberate shifts in meaning. For example the Spanish words "As Hispanics, we believe in the American dream," was changed to "As Americans, we believe in the American dream."
     And whereas the official DNC State of the Union response in English made by the Democratic majority leader in the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, didn't mention the president's proposal on amnesty, Gov. Richardson spent almost of third of his time making the case for an unconditional amnesty for illegal aliens.
     Governor Richardson and the DNC, however, should be forgiven. They are only trying to one-up President Bush and the Republican National Committee who are equally guilty of promoting the linguistic division of our country for political ends. After all it was President Bush who first began giving his weekly radio address to the nation in Spanish in addition to English not long after taking office.

The ABC's of English Immersion
A new book entitled Language and Literacy for English Learners: Grades 7-12 by authors Rosalie Porter and Kevin Clark has just come out. The book gives step-by-step instructions for teaching English to non-English speaking students at the middle and high school levels using proven, English-immersion teaching methods. Available for $18 a copy, you can order the book by telephone from Sopris West publishers by calling (888) 819-7767.
     It is common knowledge that teaching a new language to older school children is more difficult than teaching it to younger children at the elementary school level. This fact has often been used by the bilingual education industry as an excuse for keeping older non-English speaking students in bilingual classrooms where they are taught primarily in their native languages.
     But now Language and Literacy for English Language Learners has removed the excuses of educators who oppose putting older children in English immersion classes. Drawn from very successful individual school programs in Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, and Texas, the book is a wealth of practical information for teaching English to non-English speaking school children in the upper grades.
     ProEnglish Chairman Bob Park said, "I can't recommend this book highly enough for anyone involved in middle and high school ESL programs."
     Porter, who has a doctorate degree in education, is the author of Forked Tongue: The Politics of Bilingual Education. She has taught English as a second language (ESL) in Springfield, Massachusetts, and worked as the director of ESL programs for the Newton, Massachusetts, public schools. Porter is the founder and director of the Institute for Research in English Acquisition and Development (READ) based in Sterling, Virginia. Clark is a director of Clark Consulting and Training, a firm that has done educational consulting with a focus on evaluating programs for language minority students for school districts across the country since 1989.

Schools overwhelmed by non-English speaking students
      The flood of non-English speaking children pouring into schools is making teaching English to non-English speakers more and more difficult. "[T]he largest wave of non-English-speaking students in the nation's history" is hitting America's 90,000 public schools. American schools are now educating 11 million children of immigrants, according to Jeffery S. Passel, a demographer at the Urban Institute who has studied the recent unprecedented growth of second-generation Hispanics
      It is not only the overwhelming number of students that the schools have to deal with but also the large number of foreign languages. The 17 schools of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, for example, teach students who speak 20 languages, including children from Bosnia and Albania and Hmong refugees from Southeast Asia
       "Trying to teach English to this large and ever growing number of school children English is like trying to run on a treadmill that continues to gain speed," noted KC McAlpin, executive director of ProEnglish. "We simply have to recognize that there are limits to the numbers of new immigrants we can take if we are going to teach them all English and help them achieve the American dream."

Dispatches from the Bilingual Ed. Battlefront: Santa Ana Limits Immersion Waivers      Five years after Californians voted to teach their children in English and end the failed bilingual programs, the Santa Ana School District is finally complying with the spirit of the law by limiting waivers to English immersion classes. School Superintendent Al Mijares is personally reviewing waiver requests and, for the first time in Santa Ana's history, rejecting those that do not demonstrate special needs. In the past all such requests were granted.      Proposition 227, passed in 1998 by 61 percent of the voters, required that all California students be taught in English, but made it easy to get waivers. So for years, Santa Ana School Board Chairman Nativo Lopez - a diehard defender of bilingual education - used the waiver loophole and his power on the board to block the implementation of the popular mandate. His recall last February was Santa Ana citizens' second attempt to express their will regarding bilingual education. The campaign to recall Lopez was led by Hispanic parents like Vivian Martinez that were outraged their children were not being taught English in school.      Since the recall and Superintendent Mijares' tougher stance was made known, requests for bilingual education have dropped 40 percent, from 6,388 last fall to 3,844 this year.       Massachusetts bilingual-ed teachers drop suit in exchange for immersion classes      Five bilingual education teachers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, who lost their jobs when they failed to pass English fluency tests have dropped their lawsuit against the city for wrongful termination in exchange for … free English immersion classes!      Under the Massachusetts English immersion law adopted by a landslide 68 percent margin in a 2002 voter referendum, all teachers of English as a second language were required to pass English fluency tests. Twenty former bilingual education teachers in the Lawrence city school system failed to meet the requirement and were given a one-year unpaid leave of absence.      Fifteen of the teachers later sued the city claiming their termination was illegal discrimination. But ten of the plaintiffs dropped out of the suit for various reasons leaving only five. The matter was resolved through arbitration this October when the city offered to pay the cost of intensive, two to three month-long English immersion classes for each of the five in exchange for dropping the suit.      School officials said none of the teachers would be paid or receive benefits until they were fluent and literate in English. The teachers' lawyer said they were "happy to have arbitration come so quickly."       Bilingual education industry tries reinventing itself as "dual immersion"      The latest attempt of the bilingual education industry to preserve its power and privileges at the expense of helpless school children involves so-called "dual immersion" programs. Promoted by the California Association for Bilingual Education, these programs are now being offered by 148 California schools in Los Angeles, Santa Ana, San Bernardino, and the Bay Area.      Dual immersion programs refer to classrooms that are comprised 50/50 of English speaking students and students that speak a "minority" language. In San Bernadino, California, that means Spanish. Kindergarteners learn 90 percent of their lessons in Spanish; in first grade, the percentage decreases to 80 percent, and so on. Dual-immersion program administrators claim that most students will be "bi-literate" by fifth or sixth grade.      The program is popular with some parents of English-speaking children who want their children to learn a second language at an early age. The problem is that once again the bilingual education industry is retarding the acquisition of English by non-English speaking school children by continuing to teach them in their native language. The other issue is cost. The five-year San Bernadino program is being funded by a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.      "It sounds like bilingual education with a different name," said Ron Unz, coauthor of the 1998 initiative eliminating bilingual education in California.       Arizona threatens to cut funding to schools defying immersion law      Three years of circumventing Arizona law came to an abrupt end this fall when Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne threatened to cut the funding of schools that were using waiver programs to continue bilingual instruction. The Tucson school district rushed to comply under the threat of losing money      When they passed Proposition 203 by a lopsided 63 percent margin in 2000, the people of Arizona said clearly they wanted their students to be taught in English. Such English immersion programs often prepare students to enter mainstream classrooms after just one year. In contrast, bilingual education programs typically take five years or more, and frequently fail to graduate students who can speak English at all. Several Arizona school districts had been misusing waiver provisions to continue their bilingual education programs. Incredibly, the children whose tests showed the weakest ability in English were the ones being barred from immersion classrooms.      Superintendent Horne said that school districts defying the law will be prohibited from applying for state grants, which is a major source of funding for some programs. The Arizona law also gives parents the right to sue school board members and administrators who violate it.      "Arizona's Superintendent Horne has taught the rest of the country a great lesson about how to effectively enforce English-immersion laws - cut off funding to schools that defy them," said Bob Park, Arizona resident and chairman of ProEnglish.

1 in 5 U.S. Residents Don't Speak English At Home
     The 2000 census shows that nearly one in five U.S. residents five years old and older speak a language other than English at home. That is an increase of 15 million over the past decade. The number of residents who did not speak English at home more than doubled in six states over the past decade. In Nevada the number increased by 193 percent, in Georgia by 164 percent, and in North Carolina by 151 percent.
     Nationally from 1990 to 2000, the number of Spanish-speaking households grew 62 percent, from 17.3 million in 1990 to 28.1 million. After English and Spanish, Chinese was the most commonly spoken language at home, with 2 million Americans speaking Chinese.
     The census also measured for "linguistic isolation," that is, for households in which no adult speaks English "very well." Linguistic isolation is an indication of how poorly our nation's assimilation process is working. From 1990 to 2000, the number of linguistically isolated U.S. residents increased by more than half (53.6 percent) from 7.7 million to 11.9 million. Spanish-speakers in particular were slower to learn English, which researchers attribute to the sheer size of the Spanish-speaking population, the widespread availability of Spanish-language media, and programs like bilingual education that teach school children in their native languages.
     Commenting on the census findings, Ed Rubenstein, president of ESR Research Economic Consultants, said, "If current immigration continues, the U.S. in coming decades will be increasingly characterized by linguistic concentration with linguistically isolated Spanish speakers accounting for ever larger shares of U.S. population, and linguistic diversity, with an increasing number of non-English language enclaves scattered throughout the nation. The Greeks had a word for this: Balkanization."
     
Help fight anti-English media bias
     As you have pored over newspapers lately, you may have noticed a new "language" strategy on the English-language battlefront. Anti-English rhetoric is punctuating news stories. English immersion classes are being termed by reporters as "English-only" or "sink-or-swim ESL programs." Anti-English advocates are describing the one-year English immersion programs as the permanent segregation of children.
     Reporters' stories often begin with the presumption that as a country we are required to provide services in every language someone else speaks. For example, a recent Associated Press story focused on how American health care providers were failing at providing translation services, never alluding to the fact that this is not what they were created to do.
     Too often reporters ignore the fact that every non-English speaking immigrant now here knew the U.S. was an English-speaking country before they decided to immigrate. While we certainly wish them well and want to help, it is their responsibility - not ours - to do the same thing that previous generations of immigrants have done and overcome the language barrier by learning English.
     So, if you see wording or entire news stories in your newspaper that are biased against English, please write a letter to the paper's editor and send us a copy. We need your help to hold the press accountable for publishing increasingly slanted stories as news.

Germany may make German mandatory for immigrants
     An "integration" bill introduced in the German parliament would penalize immigrants and resident aliens who fail to learn German by cutting welfare and unemployment benefits
     Foreigners residing in Germany but unable to speak satisfactory German would be required to enroll in language courses, as well courses on German law, history, and culture. If they refused, their welfare and unemployment payments would be reduced, and the law would make it more difficult for them to become permanent residents. One other European country, the Netherlands, has a similar assimilation program.
     About nine percent of Germany's population is foreign-born, representing approximately 7.3 million foreigners. Some 78,000 new immigrants and 50,000 foreigners who reside in Germany would take the courses each year. In addition to Germany's large population of non-Germans, the law would apply to some 2.3 million ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union that moved to Germany in recent years
     
Report shows Puerto Rican statehood party spent lavishly on lobbying effort
     In an all-out bid for Puerto Rican statehood, the government of former Puerto Rican Governor Pedro Rossello spent lavishly on high-powered Washington lobbying firms. Data from the Center for Responsive Politics, recently analyzed in a report by the National Stop Puerto Rican Statehood Committee, shows that the impoverished island of 3.7 million people spent almost $20 million from 1998 through June of 2002 to lobby Congress and the executive branch
     The data shows that Puerto Rico spent over $4 million a year in lobbying expenses during the period, far more than any single U.S. state and nine times the average state expenditure for lobbying purposes
     The massive lobbying campaign took place despite the results of a 1998 referendum on the island in which a majority of Puerto Rico's citizens voted against statehood
     In November 2001, however, Governor Rossello's pro-statehood party was decisively defeated and replaced by the anti-statehood party of Puerto Rico's current Governor Sila Calderon
     
Bilingual polls: invitation to electoral fraud
     The Bush Administration's push for bilingual ballots and additional bilingual voting assistance at polling places across the country is creating an environment ripe for electoral fraud. The arrest of translators at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for terrorists on suspicion of "possible espionage," has exposed the dangers that can arise from ill-intentioned translators. Press reports indicate the interpreters may have "intentionally sabotaged interviews with detainees by inaccurately translating interrogators' questions and prisoners' answers."
     Bilingual voting places create the same opportunity for sabotage or fraud in our electoral system. What is to stop a bilingual poll worker from influencing voters if other election officials cannot understand their communications? Who can assure that questions are answered accurately or that instructions are non-partisan? English-speaking election officials and poll workers would be oblivious to fraud at the voting booths
     Yet this is exactly the situation that Bush Administration's Department of Justice is forcing upon Berks County Pennsylvania. The Justice Department went to court to force Berks County to hire Spanish-speaking poll workers and set up a Spanish-only voter information line. Since Pennsylvania law does not require voters to identify themselves, there is little practical way to stop illegal voting by non-citizens
      "The Administration's demand that the county hire bilingual election officials goes far beyond the bilingual ballot requirements of the Voting Rights Act, which the county has long complied with," said ProEnglish executive director KC McAlpin. "You can see that in the highly-charged political atmosphere we live in now, the Administration's 'hear no evil, see no evil' approach to forcing foreign language communications into our polling places is an open invitation to Tammany Hall style electoral fraud," he added
     
ProEnglish is sole objector to Commerce Dept. multilingual rules
     When the Department of Commerce published draft guidelines last spring on how they planned to implement Executive Order 13166, the mandate for multilingual government that ProEnglish and many members of Congress are fighting to overturn (see related stories), and invited public comments, only one organization bothered to respond. "[The U.S. Department of] Commerce received only one comment in response to the . . . notice. The organization ProEnglish, of Arlington, Va.," said the official notice acknowledging ProEnglish's opposition
     "Tracking these regulations and pointing out how illegitimate, costly, and burdensome they are, is one of the several ways we are fighting EO 13166," said ProEnglish Executive Director K.C. McAlpin. "Sometimes getting a single word changed can make a big difference in the way a particular law or order is implemented. So we will continue objecting to this outrageous order and seek to nullify it every way we can, " he added.

What You Can Do
To express your views on official English to President Bush, call (202) 456-1414.
To call your U.S. Senators or U.S. Representative, call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to their office.
For information about bills in Congress and suggested action items, access ProEnglish's website at www.ProEnglish.org.