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Date Posted: 20:40:31 11/29/07 Thu
Author: JMR (Hablo espanol....)
Subject: No habla ingles!





Article published Nov 29, 2007
Study: many naturalized Hispanics don't speak English


November 29, 2007


By Stephen Dinan - Only about half of Hispanic immigrants who have earned U.S. citizenship can speak English well or even somewhat well, a new study has found, even though the citizenship test usually requires immigrants to demonstrate English proficiency.

The Pew Hispanic Center's study also found most Hispanic immigrants overall — U.S. citizens, legal immigrants and illegal aliens — don't speak English in their homes or at their workplace, though their children do.

Pew examined years of polling and found only 52 percent of Hispanic naturalized citizens speak English well or pretty well.

"It's possible several years ago the tests weren't take with the same degree of seriousness," said Rakesh Kochhar, associate director for research at the center.

English-language skills of immigrants is become a major point of focus in the immigration debate. The presidential candidates in both parties now agree on the need to encourage better English, but Congress is in the middle of a fight over whether the Bush administration should sue a business that requires employees to speak English on the job.

The citizenship test is administered as a series of questions immigrants must answer. The law does allow elderly immigrants to become citizens without having to demonstrate English skills.

The Bush administration's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing a Salvation Army store in Massachusetts, charging that the store discriminated by giving two employees a year to learn English and then firing them when they failed to do so.

D'Vera Cohn, one of the authors of the report, said the bright side of the equation is that by the second generation the vast majority of Hispanic immigrants do speak English well.

Less than 25 percent of Hispanic immigrants speak English fluently, but 88 percent of their adult children are fluent, the report found.

"For most immigrants, English is not the primary language they use in either setting. But for their grown children, it is," the report's authors said.



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