English as a second, third, fourth, fifth…. language

Our lovely city council is at it again. This time they want to spend $20 million in taxpayer dollars to have translation and interpretation services in 8 different languages for immigrant parents.

I would like to know why the city council feels the need to aid New York City immigrants in not becoming Americanized, who already do whatever they can to not learn English or even care if their children do. The hundreds of store signs down Flushing in various Asian writing shows these immigrants do not care to become American or even want to have Americans patronize their neighborhoods.

Since the founding of this country we have had a tradition of immigrants coming over and making sure that if not them but their children learned English and progressed in society. My America family started with Italian immigrants on my dad’s side and Hungarian immigrants on my mom’s side. There was no translation for them and even more they didn’t want it. They valued and respected the idea of coming to America and its attached dreams. They demanded their children learned English going as far as not allowing them to speak anything other than English in the home.

This latest bill will only add to the current problem of new immigrants coming to America looking to not become American but instead looking defiantly to shun America, keeping their loyalties to their country of origin.