Made In America - Bill Bryson [231]
Nor is it any accident that immigrants are a disproportionate presence in many of those industries – pharmaceuticals, medical research, entertainment, the computer industry – that are most vital to America’s continued prosperity. A third of the engineers in California’s silicon valley, for instance, were born in Asia. As one observer has put it: ‘America will win because our Asians will beat their Asians.’23
Quite apart from the argument that foreign cultures introduce a welcome measure of diversity into American life, no evidence has ever been adduced to show that immigrants today, any more than in the past, persist with their native tongues. A study by the Rand Corporation in 1985 found that 95 per cent of the children of Mexican immigrants in America spoke English, and that half of these spoke only English. According to another survey, more than 90 per cent of Hispanics, citizens and non-citizens alike, believe that residents of the United States should learn English.24
If history is anything to go by, then three things about America’s immigrants are as certain today as they ever were: that they will learn English, that they will become Americans, and that the country will be richer for it. And if that is not a good thing, I don’t know what is.
Notes
1: The Mayflower and Before
1 American Heritage, October 1962, pp. 49–55.
2 Flexner, I Hear America Talking, p. 271
3 Heaton, The Mayflower, p. 80.
4 Wagenknecht, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, p. 105.
5 Caffrey, The Mayflower, p. 141.
6 Blow (ed.), Abroad in America, p. 79.
7 Morison, The Oxford History of the American People, p. 19
8 Enterline, Viking America, p. 10.
9 Morison, op. cit., p. 20.
10 National Geographic, November 1964, p. 721.
11 Enterline, op. cit., p. 136.
12 The Economist, 29 June 1991, p. 100.
13 Sydney Morning Herald, 16 September 1992, p. 8.
14 The Economist, 24 October 1991, p. 136.
15 National Geographic, June 1979, p. 744.
16 Stewart, Names on the Land, p. 23.
17 American Heritage, October 1962, p. 50.
18 Caffrey, op. cit., pp. 70–3.
2: Becoming Americans
1 Mencken, The American Language, 4th edn., p. 434.
2 Ibid., p. 431.
3 Vallins, Spelling, pp. 79–85
4 Krapp, The English Language in America, vol. 1, p. 201.
5 Baugh and Cable, A History of the English Language, p. 248.
6 Dohan, Our Own Words, p. 69.
7 Mencken, op. cit., p. 288.
8 Holt, Phrase and Word Origins, p. 55.
9 Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 261.
10 Flexner, I Hear America Talking, p. 63, and Mencken, op. cit., p.139.
11 American Heritage, February 1963, pp. 90–6.
12 Craigie, The Growth of American English, pp. 209–11.
13 Laird, Language in America, pp. 25–6.
14 R. Bailey, Images of English, pp. 68–9, and Mencken, op. cit., p.111.
15 Stewart, Names on the Land, p. 63.
16 Holt, op. cit., pp. 49–50.
17 Carver, A History of English in Its Own Words, p. 182.
18 R. Bailey, op. cit., p. 67.
19 Krapp, op. cit., p. 175.
20 Quoted in Marckwardt, American English, p. 28.
21 American Heritage, December 1983, p. 85.
22 Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, p. 15.
23 American Heritage, April 1963, p. 69.
24 National Geographic, June 1979, p. 735.
25 Ibid., p. 764.
26 Morison, The Oxford History of the American People, p. 41.
27 Lacey, Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 90.
28 Jones, American Immigration, p. 18.
29 Ibid., p. 22.
30 Morison, op. cit., p. 82.
3: A ‘Democratical Phrenzy’: America in the Age of Revolution
1 Morison, The Oxford History of the American People, p. 172.
2 Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 30.
3 American Heritage, June 1970, pp. 54–9.
4 Stephen T. Olsen, ‘Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death