Political Quotes

“for my 5 minutes, I want to speak to the issue of language and its relationship to immigration in this country. There has been a great deal of debate in recent months about the issue of declaring English the official language of the United States. Much of this movement is fueled by a sense of resentment about trying to deal with new, diverse elements in American society dealing with the pervasive sense of foreignness that many people have. People talk different, people look different, people act different. One of the ways that perhaps some people feel the way to kind of bring some order into this is to declare English the official language. There is not much we can do about such resentment except to kind of wait awhile and see if people understand the origins of where their resentment comes from; but there is also allied with this a great deal of misunderstanding and misimpressions and a lack of information about what immigrants are all about. I want to bring some attention to a study, a recent study, done by Prof. Alejandro Portes, of the Johns Hopkins University, and Ruben Rumbaut of Michigan State, who have recently concluded a study entitled "Growing up American: Dilemmas of the New Second Generation," which I believe refutes many, many of the misconceptions people have about immigrants.”