Press "ONE" for English: Language Policy, Public Opinion, and American Identity available in Paperback
Press "ONE" for English: Language Policy, Public Opinion, and American Identity
- ISBN-10:
- 0691130574
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691130576
- Pub. Date:
- 02/25/2007
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691130574
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691130576
- Pub. Date:
- 02/25/2007
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
Press "ONE" for English: Language Policy, Public Opinion, and American Identity
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Overview
Using focus groups and survey data, Schildkraut develops a model of public conceptions of what it means to be American and demonstrates the complex ways in which people draw on these conceptions when forming and explaining their views. In so doing she illustrates how focus group methodology can help yield vital new insights into opinion formation.
With the rise in the use of ballot initiatives to implement language policies, understanding opinion formation in this policy area has become imperative. This book enhances our understanding of this increasingly pressing concern, and points the way toward humane, effective, and broadly popular language policies that address the realities of American demographics in the twenty-first century while staying true to the nation's most revered values.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691130576 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/25/2007 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Press "ONE" for English
Language Policy, Public Opinion, and American IdentityBy Deborah J. Schildkraut
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2005 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
Chapter One
INTRODUCTIONIN 1996, WAYLAND H. COOLEY, the tax assessor of Madison County, Alabama, was sued for refusing to grant a tax credit-a local benefit that is supposed to be given to people who live in the homes that they own rather than renting them out-to a Korean-American family and to other minorities. He defended his action by arguing that even with a translator, he could not be sure if their oath of residency was accurate. He also maintained that his refusal to grant the credit was in accord with the state's constitution, which declares that English is the official state language. The case was eventually settled in November of 1999, with Cooley agreeing to grant the tax credits as long as the applicants brought translators (Sack 1999; Associated Press 1999).
Nearby, in suburban Atlanta, some Hispanic store owners were fined for violating an ordinance that requires signs to be at least 75 percent English. In defense of making words like supermercado be changed to supermarket, Sergeant H. Smith, a local police officer, said, "The 'super' is English. But I don't know what 'mercado' means. If an American was out there driving by, he wouldn't know what that was" (Branigin 1999). The case is working its way through the judicial system, with the store owners charging that theordinance violates their freedom of speech (Lezin 1999b). As in Alabama, English is the official language in Georgia.
Regardless of whether one finds the actions and comments of Cooley and Smith to be offensive, justified, or simply entertaining, it is certain that conflicts such as these are becoming more and more common in the United States. The ethnic composition of the population has undergone dramatic changes over the past thirty years. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, levels of immigration rose steadily, as did the proportion of immigrants arriving from Latin American and Asian countries. The government estimates that the foreign-born now make up 11.5 percent of the population, up from 5 percent in 1970 (Camarota 1999; Schmidley 2003). Several public policy issues have gained prominence in response to these demographic changes, including bilingual education, immigration laws, border enforcement, official-English laws, and the provision of public services to immigrants.
All levels of government, from the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court to the assemblies of places like Evergreen Park, Illinois, and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, have been faced with the challenge of developing appropriate policies to help immigrants adapt and become full members of the community. In 1996, for example, four Chicago suburbs, including Evergreen Park, voted to make English their official town language. Supporters claimed that the measures were intended to encourage immigrants to learn English and, as one mayor argued, to ensure that they would become better citizens and be able to do more than "sweep floors [and] work in places like McDonald's" (Cotliar 1996). But not everyone saw such admirable intent. Critics charged that the declaration was a form of immigrant bashing and would only promote discrimination and alienation. Also in the mid-1990s, six towns in Bergen County, New Jersey, including Englewood Cliffs, passed ordinances requiring storefront signs in foreign languages to have words in English. Some of those towns have since repealed their ordinances to avoid lawsuits, though supporters still assert the integrity of their concerns: promoting communication among residents and protecting public safety by ensuring that firefighters and emergency crews can locate where they need to be (Geller 1997). As these examples illustrate, policies that deal with language have become both common and contentious, and debates about how to respond to the presence of non-English-speaking residents and citizens, including debates about whether to make English the official language, have become an important feature of American political discourse.
Official-English legislation consistently enjoys widespread support among the American people. In 1998, for example, Alaska voters approved an initiative to make English the official state language with 70 percent of the vote (Clark 1998). Also in 1998, California voters opted to end bilingual education programs by passing Proposition 227 with 61 percent of the vote (Terry 1998). Since then, Arizona and Massachusetts have done the same. In the 1994 General Social Survey (GSS), 60 percent of the respondents supported making English the official language of the country, and other surveys throughout the 1990s show similar figures. This high level of public support for restrictive language policies remains substantial across the traditional political and social cleavages along which competing interests in America normally divide. Hispanics and liberals tend to be the only groups whose support for official-English is under 50 percent, but even among these groups, support is often above 25 percent.
With figures such as these, the question that begs to be answered is, why do so many people support restrictive language policies? The high levels of public support become even more curious when we take into account some key elements of the role of the English language in American society. First, for all practical purposes, English already is the de facto official language of the United States. Second, most non-English speakers are aware of the need to learn English if they hope to "make it" in mainstream American life. It is also becoming more and more essential to learn English if one hopes to "make it" anywhere in the world. Third, most immigrants and their children want to and do learn English (Stevens 1994; Portes and Rumbaut 2001) and think that the United States should expect immigrants to learn English (Public Agenda 2003). In short, strong incentives to learn English already exist, and by and large, those incentives work (Schmidt 2000). Moreover, there is no evidence to suggest that making English the official language would add to the incentive structure or make it easier for people to learn English.
Because a logical connection between learning English and official-English laws appears to be lacking, accounts of support for official-English laws have tended to focus on two other motivations, both of which simply involve the desire to make immigrants feel unwelcome. The first motivation is economic security. The argument here is that people become more willing to close borders and deny services to immigrants when they perceive that either the nation or their own family is economically vulnerable. Conventional wisdom holds that people blame immigrants when they fear for their economic security. By this reasoning, official-English is just a way to send a message that "America is for Americans" and that we should look after our own before expending our efforts on others. I show in later chapters that evidence for this economic security argument is less than sound despite the intuitive appeal of its hypotheses.
The second motivation is racism, or more precisely, anti-immigrant sentiments targeted specifically at Latinos and Asians (e.g., Perea 1997). The United States has always had citizens who do not know English, yet official-English battles are largely a recent phenomenon. That the changing face of immigration coincides with an increase in debates about language is, some fear, no coincidence at all. For instance, opponents of Atlanta's ordinance requiring signs to be 75 percent English point out that the policy has not been enforced at French and Italian restaurants the same way it has at Latino markets. Noting the potential absurdity of the ordinance, the Mexican consul general in Atlanta remarked that true enforcement would require El Taco Veloz, a restaurant chain in the area, to change its name to "Speedy Cornflour Pancake" (Lezin 1999a). Enforcement has not been taken to this extreme but rather has been more selective, leading many to feel that the motivation behind enforcement is not really about language but instead about sending a message to a particular group of people that they are not welcome.
In another example, Carbon County, Pennsylvania, passed an official-English resolution in 1997 with the support of a county commissioner who said, "We have to gear everything around Spanish. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me" (Ayers 1997). Yet Carbon County has very few non-English speakers and did not print any bilingual materials before the resolution was passed. The county did request one hundred voter registration guides in Spanish from the state in 1996, but two years later, all one hundred were still sitting in a file cabinet due to lack of demand (Ayers 1998). When a county commissioner justifies an official-English law through complaints about accommodating non-English speakers when in fact the county has never found itself negatively impacted by such accommodation, one cannot help but wonder if anything other than anti-immigrant sentiments are at work. I show throughout the analysis that such sentiments help to explain some, but not all, of the public support for restrictive language policies.
But there is also a third possible explanation for why so many Americans support official-English laws, one that has surfaced primarily in academic circles. It concerns language itself more directly than the previous explanations and focuses on conceptions of American national identity. Scholars have derived this explanation from the idea that national symbols, values, norms, and myths shape how people interpret the social and political world and help them make sense of policy debates. For some, this process will still involve a degree of racism, but for many, the ideals that are considered to make America unique are seen as endangered without a single public language. Likewise, other people feel that American values and ideals will be threatened if official-English is mandated. A wide range of American ideals, including individualism, economic opportunity, participatory democracy, openness to immigration, and tolerance, are all implicated in debates about language use. People seek to protect the images of American identity that they cherish; for some this leads to support for official-English laws, whereas for others it leads to opposition.
Americans have always been somewhat obsessed with ideas about "what it means to be an American" and with whether certain practices and beliefs emulate "the American way of life." This obsession, which seems to have gained prominence in recent years, centers on values, myths, and norms that dictate the conceptual boundaries of national identity. Some of these norms and values are ideological, others cultural. But regardless of whether the norms people associate with national identity are attitudinal or ascriptive in nature, they all have the potential to be activated when people think about the appropriate role of government in addressing political issues. In other words, this third explanation for why official-English enjoys such widespread support maintains that how people think the government should respond to ethnic change will be affected by their understanding of what it means to be an American and by their expectations about whether the proposed governmental action-or inaction-will sustain or threaten the American way of life. Many people see ethnic change as a threat to the American way of life (for a variety of reasons-some ideological and some ascriptive) and, consequently, as a threat to their own sense of self. It is this perceived threat that leads to support for official-English.
An appealing aspect of this argument is that it allows scholars to study opposition to restrictive policies rather than forcing them to rely on the assumption that opposition results from an absence of the factors that drive support. For example, American society is popularly defined by an unparalleled amount of freedom. For some people, making English the official language could be seen as a violation of certain freedoms and thus pose a threat to what America is supposed to stand for. This motivation is missed by studies that assume opposition to official-English results from simply a lack of nativist sentiments. Certain ideas about what being American means can lead to one policy preference, while other ideas about what being American means can lead to the opposite preference. Regardless of the resulting policy view, the desire to protect one's sense of national identity drives his or her opinions on the issue. There is a growing amount of evidence to support the argument that the way people define being American is an important influence on how they feel about political issues. There is disagreement, however, over what exactly people think it means to be an American and over which national norms and values should be included in the analysis. In this book, I add to the evidence that national identity shapes attitudes, and I address in great detail the competing images people hold about what being American means. I argue that these competing images constitute distinct conceptions of American identity and that all of them need to be incorporated into analyses of public support for, and opposition to, ethnicity-related policies such as official-English.
AMERICAN IDENTITY AND OFFICIAL-ENGLISH
In response to the increasing prominence of debates about language and ethnicity, more and more political scientists have begun to examine several aspects of this issue area. Some scholars have tried to understand why certain states have chosen to declare English the official state language (e.g., Hero 1998; Tatalovich 1995; Gamble 1997; Schildkraut 2001), while others study how Congress and the courts address language and immigration issues (e.g., Baron 1990; Gimpel and Edwards 1999; Schmid 2001) or how activists in language policy battles frame their positions (e.g., Perea 1997; Schmidt 2000; Schmid 2001). Another set of research examines public opinion and seeks to understand how Americans feel about issues that arise from ethnic change and why (e.g., Espenshade and Calhoun 1993; Espenshade and Hempstead 1996; Huddy and Sears 1995; Hood et al. 1997; Hood and Morris 1997; Vidanage and Sears 1995; Citrin, Reingold, and Green 1990; Citrin, Reingold, Walters, and Green 1990; Citrin et al. 1997; Citrin and Duff 1998; Frendreis and Tatalovich 1997; Citrin, Sears, Muste, and Wong 2001). On one level, these studies have provided avenues through which we can learn more about the broader sets of issues surrounding state politics and the initiative process, congressional position taking and agenda setting, and opinion formation. On another level, they have helped to advance the study of ethnic politics and policy in the United States, a growing research tradition itself.
Following suit, my goals in this book are to contribute to our understanding of opinion formation on a general level and to provide an analysis of how Americans use their interpretations of American identity to come to terms with the specific and increasingly salient issue of language policy. I define and document four distinct conceptions of American identity and show how each one is implicated in debates about language use. The four conceptions are the universally accepted liberal tradition (America as a land of freedom and opportunity), the under-studied civic republican tradition (America as a participatory democracy with vibrant communities and dutiful citizens), the highly contested ethnocultural tradition (America as a nation of white Protestants), and the equally contested incorporationist tradition (America as a diverse "nation of immigrants"). I rely on focus groups with ordinary Americans and survey data to establish that these four traditions guide what people think it means to be American and to demonstrate how people rely on them when forming and explaining their views on different language policies, such as declaring English the official language and printing election ballots only in English. Throughout, I argue that these different conceptions of American identity are often at odds with one another and can be internally conflictual as well, and I show how these clashes between and within alternative ideas of what it means to be an American are an integral part of how people debate these salient political issues. People on both sides of the language issue have very strong and cherished notions of what being an American means, and both sides feel that their sense of American identity is at stake in these debates.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Press "ONE" for English by Deborah J. Schildkraut Copyright © 2005 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. v
- Figure and Tables, pg. vii
- Acknowledgments, pg. ix
- CHAPTER ONE. Introduction, pg. 1
- CHAPTER TWO. Symbolic Politics, pg. 21
- CHAPTER THREE. Theories of American Identity, pg. 38
- CHAPTER FOUR. American Identity in Surveys, pg. 67
- CHAPTER FIVE. Defining American National Identity, pg. 86
- CHAPTER SIX. Discussing Language Policy, pg. 127
- CHAPTER SEVEN. Mixed Messages, pg. 162
- CHAPTER EIGHT. Conclusion, pg. 193
- Appendix A: Exploratory Factor Analysis of American Identity Items (1996 GSS), pg. 207
- Appendix B: Question Wording and Coding for 1996 GSS Data Analyzed in Chapter 4, pg. 209
- Appendix C: Focus Group Procedures, pg. 213
- Appendix D: Question Guide for Focus Groups, pg. 222
- Appendix E: Coding Ambivalent and Opinionless Policy-related Thoughts, pg. 224
- References, pg. 227
- Index, pg. 237
What People are Saying About This
"This book represents an important contribution to public opinion research generally and to the study of U.S. language policy in particular. Deborah Schildkraut not only convincingly demonstrates that conceptions of American national identity are key causal factors shaping people's opinions about language policy issues, but she also advances the study of this identity."—Ronald Schmidt, California State University, Long Beach, author of Language Policy and Identity Politics in the United States"This well-written, intelligently organized book shows that public opinion of ordinary people is more complex, more situational, more subtle than what simple-minded survey questions reveal."—Raymond Tatalovich, Loyola University Chicago, author of Nativism Reborn? The Official English Language Movement and the States
This book represents an important contribution to public opinion research generally and to the study of U.S. language policy in particular. Deborah Schildkraut not only convincingly demonstrates that conceptions of American national identity are key causal factors shaping people's opinions about language policy issues, but she also advances the study of this identity.
— Ronald Schmidt, California State University, Long Beach, author of "Language Policy and Identity Politics in the United States"
This well-written, intelligently organized book shows that public opinion of ordinary people is more complex, more situational, more subtle than what simple-minded survey questions reveal.
— Raymond Tatalovich, Loyola University Chicago, author of "Nativism Reborn? The Official English Language Movement and the States"