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ARLINGTON, Va. ? K.C. McAlpin, the executive director of ProEnglish, an Arlington Va.-based national organization that advocates for official English, characterized a report that says Spanish-speaking immigrants in the U.S. transition readily to English across generations as both "politically motivated and flawed in its fundamental assumptions." The report is in the September issue of Population and Development Review, a publication of the Population Council. The authors are Frank Bean and Ruben Rumbaut, two sociologists at the University of California, Irvine, and Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton.

McAlpin said the report's data is of limited value because it relies on the intergenerational experience of families who arrived and established themselves during a period of relatively low immigration, compared to the unprecedented immigration of non-English speaking immigrants in recent years. "They are comparing apples and oranges," said McAlpin. "Census data clearly shows the nation is in new and un-chartered waters in terms of immigration, assimilation, and the acquisition of English. For example the number of residents the Census classifies as 'linguistically isolated,' grew to almost 12 million by 2000, an increase of more than 50 percent in a single decade." Census data also shows that Spanish-speaking immigrants are slower at acquiring English than other immigrant groups and that the inter-generational shift toward English is lower in the Spanish-speaking population.

"With the English Language Unity Act, H.R. 997 by Rep. Steve King (Iowa), a bipartisan official English bill backed by 162 co-sponsors now pending in the House, and Senate passage this spring of an amendment declaring English our 'national language,' left-wing academics like Bean, Massey, and Rumbaut are panicked at the thought that Congress might pass this legislation," said McAlpin. "So they recycled previously published research and got a sympathetic journal to publish their 'report' in a transparent effort to influence the political debate," he added.

"The report's authors are clearly biased against a common American language and culture," said McAlpin. "Whereas most Americans see English's role as the common unifying language of our nation rapidly eroding, these sociology professors perceive no danger at all. Instead they see a danger in assimilation and the immigrants' loss of fluency in their native language, which they want to discourage."

based on 2001 census