“Language use is something that’s got many different aspects to it,” Lopez said. By the third generation, English use is dominant.”Īnd in 2015, Pew found that English proficiency was growing while the share who speak Spanish at home was declining.Ī more recent report from Pew found that nearly four in 10 Latinos said they’d experienced discrimination in the past year, and that 22% of Latinos said they’d been criticized for speaking Spanish in public. In the second generation, use of Spanish falls as use of English rises. “Immigrant Hispanics are most likely to be proficient in Spanish, but least likely to be proficient in English. “Language use among Hispanics in the US reflects the trajectories that previous immigrant groups have followed,” Pew said in 2012. In fact, researchers have observed this for over a decade, he told CNN. And over the past few decades, this kind of comment has been a regular refrain as part of arguments against immigration.īut for years, study after study has shown it simply isn’t true.Īs Mark Hugo Lopez, director of global migration and demography for the Pew Research Center, noted on Twitter, Latinos’ English proficiency has been on the rise for years. The very same critiques we hear now about Latino immigrants were once used to criticize large groups of immigrants who arrived from Europe. Historians have noted that this is a tale as old as the United States itself.
… They ought not to be just codified in their communities,” Brokaw said in a TV roundtable Sunday, “but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities.”įormer White House chief of staff John Kelly made a similar assertion in an interview with NPR last year, saying Central American immigrants “don’t speak English and don’t integrate well.” “I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. The remarks - which Brokaw has since tried to walk back - ignited a firestorm of criticism. If former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw’s comments that Hispanics “should work harder at assimilation” sounded familiar to you, they should.
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