Abstract
Limited proficiency in the dominant, national, or official language of a country is likely to limit one’s ability to function effectively in public life. Language skills can be an important determinant of economic and social well-being in the society. The length of time immigrants have spent in the United States is a primary determinant of their ability to acquire English language skills so that younger cohorts of immigrants tend to function better than older ones in later life. Federal laws prohibit recent immigrants from participating in most Federal welfare and entitlement programs unless they become naturalized citizens, but their limited language skills are barriers to their undertaking the steps toward naturalization. This limitation also directly affects their ability to use health care services and other social services. In this chapter I discuss the leading socioeconomic consequences of a lack of facility in the national or principal language, e.g. English in the United States. The areas covered are education, the workplace, health care, and civil rights.
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Notes
- 1.
Several different measures of the high-school dropout rate can be devised. They fall into two classes, status-type rates and cohort-type rates. Those presented in the main text are status-type rates, analogous to central rates in general. A status-type rate can be calculated on the basis of age alone, but not on the basis of school grade alone. On the other hand, a cohort-type rate can be calculated on the basis of school grade, not on the basis of age. Where a status-type rate based on age is calculated, the width of the age band can vary, as in the main text examples. However, widening the age band brings in many Hispanics who were educated abroad and substantially raises the high-school dropout rate . For example, the Pew Hispanic Research/Fry study, using the 2000 census, reported a status dropout rate of 21% for 16-to-19-year-old Hispanics, but a rate of 36% for 18-to-24-year-old Hispanics. The rates with different age bands each have their own uses.
An example of a cohort-type rate based on school grade is the percentage of the population who are enrolled in school-grade nine at the very beginning of the school year (the denominator) who are not enrolled in grade 12 at the very end of the school year three school-years later and have not earned a high-school diploma or GED certificate (the numerator). It is possible also to calculate a cohort rate combining grade and age at the initial year in a percentage and grade and age at the terminal year in a percentage, and then taking the ratio of these two percentages.
All the dropout rates are affected by certain extraneous factors, such as deaths, severe illness, and migration to and from the community during the intervening years. With additional analysis, their effects can be eliminated. The effect of in-migration, and even the other extraneous factors, can be eliminated from the cohort rates by matching the files of the students and establishing the basis of the non-matches.
- 2.
A specific form of linguistic profiling is accent prejudice. It may be defined as the perception that certain accents are superior to others. Romaine (2000) has attributed the perception that one accent is superior to another to its use by the more powerful segment of society. The “superior” accent in the United States is that used by speakers of Standard English. Standard English is a theoretical construct presumably representing the English spoken and written by educated persons who use correct orthography, grammar, and pronunciation. Since there are many regional dialects of English in the United States, there are many Standard Englishes, each viewed as the “real” Standard English by its speakers. Hence, any Standard English is really only one of many dialects of English.
- 3.
This section draws heavily on the report, Population Reference Bureau, “Elderly immigrants in the United States,” Today’s Research on Aging, No. 29, October 2013. The report summarizes research on elderly immigrants.
- 4.
Immigrants are ineligible for social services for at least 5 years after arrival under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 tightened enforcement at the borders and added to restrictions on employment and public assistance allowances for illegal aliens.
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Siegel, J.S. (2018). Limited Language Proficiency and Its Consequences. In: Demographic and Socioeconomic Basis of Ethnolinguistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61778-7_16
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