Leaving aside for a moment the fact that intergenerational linguistic assimilation is faster for the present wave of Spanish-speaking immigrants than for any large group of immigrants in U.S. history AND the fact that this country has NO national language, this sticker got me thinking. U.S. history is full of fears about Chinese, Irish, Italian, German, Slavic immigrants and their allegedly inferior character and slowness of assimilation.
There was great paranoia, for instance, in Cincinnati in the middle of the 19th century that the Germans were not speaking English and that the immigrants would “take over” the city. When immigrants come into a nation- into a community- they most often occupy the lowest strata in the labor market. It turns out that no matter which racial group (however contemporaneously defined) is represented, these poor immigrants are always believed to be violent, lazy, highly sexualized, unintelligent, and generally immoral. This way of understanding immigrant groups — and perhaps more importantly their lifestyle and life chances — makes their exploitation and subjugation all the easier to explain and tolerate. The ways in which today’s immigration “debate” is framed include plenty of these old and deeply troubling stereotypes.
My last thought on this for today: I wonder if the chain-smoking guy in the rebel flag hat that occupied this car considered that “America” is a hemisphere, not a country- and that the majority of the folk who inhabit this half of the world speak a language that is presumably not his own. Irony much?