Not long after he returned to the White House last year, President Trump signed an executive order that made English the official language of the United States. “To promote unity, cultivate a shared American culture for all citizens, ensure consistency in government operations, and create a pathway to civic engagement, it is in America’s best interest for the Federal Government to designate one — and only one — official language,” the statement read.
As Code Switch’s Xavier Lopez explains in this week’s episode, Trump’s gutting of English language learning is one of the under-considered fronts in his nativist project. Because what the directive meant in practice was that many parts of the federal government just stopped offering non-English language options for government services and paperwork altogether. It also froze the money set aside for the backlogged programs to help people learn English across the country. As Xavier points out, those English language learner programs often act as pipeline to all kinds of other social services for immigrants to the U.S. — and just as importantly, a place where messing up as folks learn the (ridiculous! contradictory!) rules of the language has really low stakes.
Emily Bogle/NPR
And it makes sense that this story made Xavier’s antennae twitch: he came to the U.S. from Ecuador as a young kid, and learned English from watching reruns of “Who’s The Boss?” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.” (And as anyone who knows him for 10 minutes quickly learns, he will always put on for his native Queens — which is generallyconsidered the mostlinguistically diverse place on the planet.) “I vividly remember my dad reading books with a Spanish-English dictionary at hand often after a long day of working at this moving company, so I understood that it was really harder for [my parents to learn English],” he said on this week’s episode. ”That's kind of why I wanted to approach this story, because it felt personal, and I understood that there were challenges that adults face when learning English that were completely different to what I had experienced.”
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Written by Gene Dembyand editedby Dalia Mortada
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