Over the past two years, politicians and private citizens alike have raised concerns on the growing Latino populace in American society. The 2016 Presidential election highlighted many of these voices, starting with the then Republican nominee, Donald Trump. His rhetoric on Mexicans was relentless, claiming, “They are not our friend, believe me. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Other than displaying pure prejudice, this anti-Mexican sentiment developed into the anti-Latino viewpoint we have seen since the turn of the millennia. Samuel P. Huntington, a passed professor at Harvard, exemplified this view much earlier than Trump with his article, “The Hispanic Challenge,” in 2004. His claims to maintain the “Anglo-Protestant culture” of the United States…show more content… Legally, there is no national language of the United States, so legally this aspect of life is free territory. However, it is different from a moral standpoint. George Fletcher in his essay, “The Case for Linguistic Self-Defense,” argues, “Each language distinguishes a living culture and precisely for this reason every group of native speakers has an inherent right to defend its language against influences that threaten to eradicate or displace it.” In the case of the French-speaking province of Quebec, this argument holds true as English is certainly a threat to the survival of the French language as seen in the Canadian census report in 2017. It reports that 70% speak English while only 40% speak French. Indeed English speakers are overtaking the French in Quebec. However in the case of the United States, Spanish does not threaten English in the same way.
When looking at the demographics of Latinos in the United States, you see that the youngest age group of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation immigrants are 87% fluent with only 1% claiming to not speak English. A whopping 37% of them only speak
