Immigrants and English

According to this report , there is nothing to worry about concerning the use of English by immigrants . What do you think ?
"Immigrants & The English Language

This past Monday was A Day Without An Immigrant, a one-day strike by
immigrant workers, both legal and illegal, to demonstrate the economic
importance of immigrant labor in the United States and to protest a bill
passed by the House of Representatives that would make illegal immigration a
felony.

This past week also saw a stir over a Spanish-language version of the
national anthem, with many believing it is unpatriotic to sing the song in
any language other than English.

As this newsletter is about language, this week we look at a couple of myths
and misconceptions about immigrants and the English language.

Myth: Immigrants Don't Want To Learn English

"I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn
English."

- George W. Bush, 28 April 2006

A common complaint is that immigrants today, unlike those of past
generations, make little effort to learn English-this is simply not true.
Most who come to this country as children will learn to speak English
fluently and those who come as adults will fail, but not through lack of
will to do so.

79% of first-generation Mexican immigrants who come to the US as children
will learn to speak English well. The percentage of Chinese immigrant
children who will do so is 88%. The difference in the numbers is that
Mexicans are much more likely to live in Spanish-speaking communities and,
therefore, have somewhat less opportunity to encounter English. But even so,
the vast majority of Mexican children who come to the U.S. will learn to
speak English. (Source
http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm )

The number of adult immigrants who learn to speak English well is much
lower, but then language acquisition in general sharply declines with age.
Immigrants who come to the U.S. before the age of eight will perform as well
as native-born Americans on English language tests. Those who immigrate
between the ages of eight and fifteen will score progressively worse the
older they were at the time they came to the United States. And those that
immigrate when even older will score the worst of all, but the results among
adult immigrants do not correlate with age. In other words, sometime in the
teens humans start losing the ability to learn new languages. It's not
impossible to learn new languages as adults, but most people find it very
hard to do so. (Source: Newport , E. Maturational constraints on language
learning. Cognitive Science, 14, 1990)

Adult immigrants don't fail to learn English because they don't want to.
They fail because they adults in general find it very hard to learn new
languages.

Myth: The large numbers of Hispanic immigrants will create a permanent split
in this country between Spanish and English speakers.

The fear is that Spanish-speaking families will create and maintain a
permanent division in this country by language-this is not true.

By the second generation (those born in the U.S. ), nearly all speak
English. Most children of immigrants will speak the immigrant language at
home, but will also be fluent in English. This is the bilingual
generation-in all ethnic groups, English fluency is nearly universal in the
second generation.

By the third generation, over 70% will speak English and no other language.
In other words, by the time you get to the grandchildren of immigrants, most
will no longer speak the immigrant language at all.

This holds for almost all immigrant groups being studied, including
Hispanics in general and Mexicans, the largest immigrant group, in
particular. The grandchildren of non-Mexican Hispanics have a greater
tendency to learn Spanish as well as English, but more than 60% will know
only English. The only third generation ethnic group that has less than 60%
of English-only speakers are Dominicans, who are 44% bilingual in the third
generation.

And these numbers are not changing significantly with the rise in the
numbers of Hispanic immigrants in the 1990s. In the 1990 census, 64% of
third-generation Mexican-Americans spoke only English. By 2000, this had
risen to 71%. (Source
http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm )

So we will not see a permanent division in this country by language. The
immigrant generation will speak a language other than English. Their
children will be bilingual. And their grandchildren will speak English only.
This is the way it has always been. It's the way it is now. And we have
every reason to suspect that it will be the way of the future as well. The
primacy of the English language in the United States is secure."