Report: 62 Million People in US Now Speak Language Other Than English at Home

by Matthew Boyle

Oct 5, 2014 8:55 PM PT

An all-time high of nearly 62 million U.S. residents – or about one in five people – now speak a language other than English while at home, a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) found.

The study, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, found 44 percent of those who don’t speak English primarily at home—a total of about 27.2 million—were born in the United States.

CIS’s research director Steven Camarota, the co-author of the report, said that this means the U.S.’s current immigration system is failing to properly assimilate people from foreign countries, and those assimilation problems are carrying over into future generations. Camarota said that can be attributed to all-time high levels of legal immigration with over a million people a year admitted into the U.S. legally, and a new “tolerance” in Washington for the continued surge of illegal immigration.

“It is important to understand that the enormous growth in foreign language use reflects past policy decisions,” Camarota said. “Allowing in over one million new legal immigrants a year and to a lesser extent tolerating illegal immigration has important implications for preserving a common language. For too long we have given little consideration to whether continuing this level of immigration, mostly legal, hinder the assimilation of immigrants and their children.”

The report found there were seven foreign languages other than English that more than a million people speak predominantly inside their homes, Spanish being the most prominent at 38.4 million. Chinese is second with 3 million people in America speaking it as the primary language inside their homes; national Philippines language Tagalog is third, with 1.6 million; Vietnamese fourth, with 1.4 million; French, fifth with 1.3 million; and Korean and Arabic are tied for sixth with 1.1 million each.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, more than a million people are allowed into the U.S. legally every year—and most of them come from non-English speaking regions in the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. A recent previous report from CIS found that a record nearly 2.5 million immigrants from “Predominantly Muslim Countries” reside inside the U.S. now, and there has also been marked growth from places like Asia, the Caribbean and Central and South America.

These immigration policies have huge impact on the American people. Another recent report from CIS found that all job growth from 2000 through 2013 went to immigrants both legal and illegal—and that native-born Americans saw no net increase in employment statistics.

“Government data show that since 2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal),” Camarota and Karen Zeigler wrote for CIS then. “This is remarkable given that native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population. Though there has been some recovery from the Great Recession, there were still fewer working-age natives holding a job in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job was 5.7 million above the 2000 level.”

During that timeframe in which Americans suffered economically, but immigrants prospered, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said on the U.S. Senate floor that the federal government handed out 30 million immigrant visas and foreign work permits to people from overseas.

Harvard labor economist George Borjas has argued that increased immigration rates in the latter part of the 20th century reduced wages and employment opportunities for lower-skilled  American workers by more than 7 percent, and U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow argues that high rates of low-skilled immigration have drastically hurt—and will continue to hurt, if they’re increased more—blacks across the country.

On the high-skilled labor side of immigration, despite pleas from CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Microsoft’s Bill Gates or Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, Howard University’s Ron Hira and other experts like University of California-Davis’ Norm Matloff, Rutgers’ Hal Salzman, Georgia State’s Paula Stephan, and Harvard Law’s Michael Teitelbaum argued in a USA Today op-ed this past summer that the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) guest workers flowing into the U.S. are hurting job opportunities and wages for Americans seeking those jobs.

“As longtime researchers of the STEM workforce and immigration who have separately done in-depth analyses on these issues, and having no self-interest in the outcomes of the legislative debate, we feel compelled to report that none of us has been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry's assertions of labor shortages,” they wrote for USA Today.

The economic impacts are not the only way this surge of immigration hurts Americans. A group of national security leaders each independently said in interviews with Breitbart News that the cultural affects of such immigration policies lead to an increased risk in the United States of terrorism.

“What we need to do is make sure everyone coming into the United States understands who we are and that we are founded on Judeo-Christian values, that there is one rule of law and that’s what’s on the books and it’s not Sharia and we need to make sure we don’t engage in the same kind of mistakes in Europe where they did not engage in assimilation,” former Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview with Breitbart News.

“[Europe] did not engage in assimilation so you ended up with pockets of decay in the Netherlands,” Hoekstra added. “I’m a native born Dutch guy, so I’m disappointed to see it happen. But where you did not have the assimilation then you have these pockets now where people are saying ‘We want Sharia law here,’ and you end up saying ‘No, no, no, no. That’s not how it works in the Netherlands. That’s not how it works in America.’ We have our sets of values and some things, and you know what, if you find our values and our laws somehow stifling and you can’t believe you can operate within them, then maybe America is not the best place for you to go. There have to be clear expectations for the kinds of behavior for the people who we allow to come into the United States. It’s a privilege; it is not a right.”

Former CIA director James Woolsey, who ran the agency during President Bill Clinton’s first two years, concurred and added that the federal government must stop treating the consequences of radical Islam—which has begun surging into the United States in a manner similar to what Europe is facing now—as “workplace violence.”

“We can’t be effective pretending that a phenomenon doesn’t exist,” Woolsey said in an interview with Breitbart News. “Calling Major [Nidal] Hassan’s murdering of his 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, which you mentioned, when he had business cards saying he was a Jihadi and he was shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he murdered them, to have an incident like that and then write as the U.S. government did in its report a characterization of what happened that said nothing at all about Islam or Muslims or Jihad or anything else is just ridiculous. Ray Bradbury’s great book Fahrenheit 451 is a portrait of what a society can be like if it turns into totally rigid political correctness and we are in danger of tilting in that direction.”

All of that is why, according to iconic conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, immigration is much different in today’s environment than it was in previous waves of immigration.

“I do think what makes immigration different today is that immigrants came in the past who embodied the spirit of 1776-a spirit to build this country,” D’Souza said in an interview with Breitbart News. “Now we’re getting some immigrants who far from wanting to pull the bandwagon, just want to sit in the bandwagon-and that’s a big change-not to mention people who actually want to do harm to the country. Look if our government can monitor our every phone call and our every email and our every motion, you can be very sure they have the technology to spot every single person coming across the border. The problem is they don’t want to.”

Polling data from The Polling Company’s Kellyanne Conway in July found that the American people are by and large opposed to the immigration plans offered by President Barack Obama and most plans put forward by Congress. The poll showed that 74 percent of likely voters nationwide believe that the president should not go through with any type of executive action on immigration on his own, while just 21 percent supported such executive action. While 52 percent of self-identified liberals did support Obama going it alone, 75 percent of middle-of-the-road voters oppose him doing so and 90 percent of conservatives oppose it. Among party registrants, 56 percent of Democratic likely voters oppose Obama going it alone, as do 81 percent of independents and 93 percent of Republicans.

Similarly, Conway’s poll asked half of the respondents if they think new jobs should go to U.S.-born workers and legal immigrants already in the country, or to illegal immigrants first—and 89 percent thought American workers and legal immigrants already here should get first priority on jobs, with just 1 percent thinking jobs should go to illegal immigrants and 9 percent didn’t know or refused to answer. Her poll asked the other half of respondents the same question with regards to whether employment should go to U.S.-born workers and legal immigrants already here, or future legal immigrants and got a very similar result: 77 percent believe that people in the U.S. already, legal immigrants and native-born citizens, should have priority for employment and just 4 percent said future legal immigrants should get employment priority, while 19 percent didn’t know or refused to answer.

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