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services.64 Advocates of these laws believe that knowledge of the English language is
essential to productive membership in American society, and say the laws will ensure that
immigrants learn it. They also argue that English is an important unifier of the country’s
diverse population.
In May 2006, the U.S. Senate voted 63 to 34 vote to designate English as the national
language. While the measure stopped short of the “official language” status sought by
English-only advocates, it did say that no one has “a right, entitlement or claim to have the
government of the United States or any of its officials or representatives act, communicate,
perform or provide services or provide materials in any language other than English.”65
Meanwhile, evidence suggests that many immigrants have the desire but lack the means to
learn English. A study by the New York Immigration Coalition found that, as of 2002, one
million immigrants in New York State were in need of English classes but there were seats
for only 50,000.66 According to the Arizona Department of Education in 2004, 5,009
adults were on waiting lists for English classes and 5,686 more were turned away.67
Latino immigrants’ frequent trips home to their native countries and adherence to the
Spanish language are cited as evidence that they are diverging from the assimilationist
path of previous immigrant groups. Some say Latinos have been slow to assimilate
because native-born Americans discriminate against them, while others argue that Latino
immigrants and their children are simply less committed to assimilation than their
European predecessors.

However, studies indicate that today’s immigrants, including Spanish speakers, are no
exception to the generational pattern. Typically, first-generation immigrants make some
progress in learning the new language, but speak mostly in their native tongue. The
second generation is typically bilingual, and the third generation speaks English
exclusively. A study conducted by a team at the State University of New York at Albany
found that 72 percent of third-or-later-generation Latino students spoke English
exclusively.68 One study notes some evidence of a decline in education among the
grandchildren of Mexican immigrants specifically. But other studies show that Latino
immigrants and their children, including Mexicans, have done much to close the
educational and economic gaps between themselves and native-born whites, and that their
progress is just as rapid as that of earlier generations of immigrants.69 Importantly, one
study notes that generational assimilation today may be less visible than it was in the past.
While the earlier wave of European immigration largely came to a halt with the
restrictionist policies of the 1920s, today’s immigrant population is in a constant state of
replenishment, so that “each generation is a mix of cohorts and each cohort has a mix of
generations.”70
Intermarriage rates, often cited as a measurement of assimilation, may be the wild card
among current trends. While interracial and interethnic marriage rates began to rise in the
1970s and continued to grow through the 1980s, a 2007 study published in
the American Sociological Review found that intermarriage rates began to decline in the
1990s, particularly between whites and Asians or Latinos; the latter two immigrant groups
have traditionally had the highest intermarriage rates with whites. The study maintains that
the growth in the immigrant population in the 1990s, especially among these two groups,
has led “more native-born Asian Americans and Latinos to marry their foreign-born
counterparts.”71 Interracial marriages involving African Americans significantly increased
during the 1990s, although the rates remained far behind those of other minorities.72

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