On Monday, Barack Obama gave his critique of the “English only” movement:
“I agree that immigrants should learn English, but instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English – they’ll learn English – you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual. We should have every child speaking more than one language.”
Members of the English only movement such as the political action committee known as Americans for Legal Immigration responded by falsely characterizing Obama’s position:
“Barack Obama has stepped on a political land mine by stating Americans should be forced to learn to speak Spanish.”
Today, Obama responded to their deceit with the truth and humor:
“The Republicans jumped on this. I said, absolutely immigrants need to learn English, but we also need to learn foreign languages, this is an example of some of the problems we get into when somebody attacks you for saying the truth, which is: We should want our children with more knowledge. We should want our children to have more skills. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a good thing. I know, because I don’t speak a foreign language. It’s embarrassing,”
Americans for Legal Immigration’s need to slander him by mischaracterizing his statement is an interesting one which suggests that they understand that they need to spread a sense of xenophobia and fear to spark the Republican base into action.
The photo used was uploaded to Flickr by jurvetson who licensed it under a Creative Commons Attribution License and my use of the photo in no way indicates an endorsement of the article from jurvetson .
