Oakland’s Bilingualism - No Americans Need Apply

[Professor Norm Matloff, a UC-Davis computer scientist, has emerged as a formidable force in the immigration debate, focusing on the impact of Congress’ high tech cheap labour special-interest pandering on his students and their careers. Here he writes about a related symptom of mass immigration: creeping bilingualism. It’s not just for breakfast any more. President Clinton publicly hoped he was the last president who couldn’t speak Spanish, VDARE has already predicted what will happen in the schools. And here it’s showing up in local government. Particularly important here is Matloff’s analysis of its public-choice consequences: No Americans need apply.]

By Norm Matloff

On Tuesday, April 24, the Oakland City Council passed a law which will require the city to fill openings in certain designated job categories (e.g. librarians, building inspectors, etc.) with workers who are bilingual in either Chinese (specifically Cantonese) or Spanish.

Council member Ignacio de la Fuente, one of the two sponsors of the measure, was interviewed on NPR's "All Things Considered" on Tuesday, and made a number of interesting remarks. [Listen to de la Fuente interview (14.4 | 28.8)]

First, as have a number of other supporters of the measure, de la Fuente claimed that the law does nothing more than existing state law, which requires that some access be provided to non-speakers of English. Clearly, that is false--if Oakland's law didn't add anything to existing state law, why did Oakland need a new law? In fact, de la Fuente admitted during the interview that the city already offers bilingual services.

The real reason for making a new law, not stated by de la Fuente and the others, is that they want much more than "some" access for the non-Anglophones; they want equal access. The term "equal access" appears throughout the statute, including in its title. So for example if a Latino who doesn't speak English goes to a city office and has to wait a long time for service because there is only one Spanish-speaking worker, de la Fuente and the others apparently consider this unacceptable.

In other words, this is not about mere access--which Oakland already offers, and which I believe most people would say is needed, but rather about convenience. (And it's also about political power; see below.)

De la Fuente (and later Jerry Brown, see below) claimed that bilingual hires would comprise only a small fraction of Oakland city jobs. This is highly misleading, for several reasons.

First, they are using as their denominator in this fraction the total number of city jobs, not the total number of city jobs in the designated categories.

Second, there are only a few jobs open per week in all the designated categories combined. That means it will take many years to hire enough people to provide "equal access." At the very least the vast majority of jobs in those categories will go to Latinos and Chinese for some years to come. (And once that "tradition" is established, and managers installed with the proper ethnicity, it probably will continue.) The brief report I watched on the Cantonese TV news Thursday night also stated that all the hires would be bilingual.

De la Fuente dismissed my April 11 San Francisco Chronicle op-ed (headlined “Oakland may recognize 2 official languages - and neither of them will be English”) as being written by an "English only" advocate, which I certainly am not. I've found that this is a common tactic, to portray me as some fringe wacko. The bio at the end of the op-ed clearly identified me as being bilingual in Chinese and English myself, and as being active in the Chinese immigrant community. (The editor had insisted on adding the latter information, even though I had given her a shorter bio on the grounds that most editors like it short.) But de la Fuente didn't tell NPR any of this.

According to press reports, at the hearing held by the Oakland City Council on Tuesday before the vote, only three brave Oakland citizens spoke out against the measure. But a large number of Latinos and Chinese spoke in favor of it--through translators. To supporters of the measure, that dramatized the "need" for the new law. But what it really did was make things worse.

It is ironic that later this week, a Chinese-American-sponsored poll was released, which showed that there is substantial prejudice against Chinese-Americans (Washington Post April 26). In particular, the poll results showed that many people view Chinese-Americans as "foreign," and more loyal to China than to the U.S. Don't they realize that this new law will reinforce negative attitudes like this?

Similarly, one of the great rallying cries taught to students in Asian-American Studies classes on university campuses is that mainstream Americans tend to presume that any Asian-American they meet is foreign-born. In the canonical scenario presented, the mainstreamer will ask, "Where are you from," and when the Asian-American answers "Chicago," the mainstreamer will ask, "No, where are you really from, what country were you born in?" While I sympathize with the frustration the Asian-Americans feel in such situations, the fact is that 70% of Asian-Americans are indeed immigrants. The mainstreamer in that scenario may be insensitive, but not illogical.

If Asian-American activists want their group to be treated as Americans, they should consider the effect of continuing high levels of Asian immigration on such attitudes - and certainly should not support laws like the new one in Oakland.

This morning, Oakland mayor Jerry Brown was interviewed on KGO radio in San Francisco. Actually, I used to be something of an admirer of his, as he has usually been much less corrupt than most politicians, but he seems to be going off the deep end these days. He had already made a fool of himself yesterday on Fox Cable News, saying "Don't worry, we won't be hiring people who know only Spanish or Chinese," which of course was never the issue. But today what Brown said was more interesting, though no less objectionable in my view.

Interestingly, Brown related the "need" for "equal access" bilingual service to the H-1B program! He spoke of the "global economy," and how much we "need" the H-1Bs (this was right after he mentioned a big plan to make Oakland a high-tech center). He said, "Go to any Silicon Valley company, and you'll see them speaking Chinese, speaking various Indian languages. Go to the computer center at UC Berkeley and you'll see the same thing. We are benefiting from importing high-tech people." 

Of course, I disagree with his view of the "need" for H-1Bs. But what he said next took me aback, because he tried to connect this issue to the bilingual-services issue:

He said that once the H-1Bs become immigrants, they bring their elderly parents to the U.S. The latter don't know English, and according to Brown, can't learn English. (My personal experience as an ESL teacher in San Francisco Chinatown says otherwise.) He went on about this at some length, about the need for elderly Chinese women to be able to complain about neighbors dumping illegal garbage. In other words, according to Brown, this new law is basically motivated by the "need" to provide "equal access" for government service to parents of immigrant programmers and engineers!

This is baloney. The vast majority of Chinese in Oakland are family immigrants, not employer-sponsored immigrants. And needless to say, I don't consider it to be relevant anyway.

I am sure that this idea was planted in Brown's ear by Danny Wan, the other City Council member who sponsored the new law. Wan, who is Chinese, was basically pushing an agenda long pursued by Chinese political activists: Concentrate Chinese immigrant seniors in major cities, in order to gain political clout. Though some of you might be surprised to hear this, it has been used quite effectively in San Francisco, and to some degree in Oakland, Monterrey Park (LA suburb) and New York. Some of us have been observing this for years, and finally Yvonne Lee, a Chinese-American on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, said it in public (AsianWeek, May 16, 1997): 

People are forecasting that [Asians] are the fastest-growing minority group due largely to immigration...But [since given the new restrictions against welfare use by future immigrants] how many people are going to take the risk of sponsoring someone [for immigration] and what long-term impact will that have on our social status and political empowerment?

The major welfare issue for the Chinese had been for the seniors. (Click to see my Senate testimony...) The Chinese activists very actively encouraged Chinese seniors to move from their adult sons' and daughters' suburban homes to places like San Francisco, living on welfare. The Chinese activists in San Francisco have been able to couple the welfare issue with their political agenda. They convince the seniors that they must vote for certain political candidates in order to preserve welfare access, particularly subsidized housing, for example. And conversely, no San Francisco official can make any decision on housing without the advice and consent of the Chinese activists.

Such efforts are bolstered by keeping the immigrants monolingual. The activists want the immigrants to be dependent on them, and keeping them monolingual is a great way to do this. As I pointed out in my Chronicle op-ed, for example, the Chinese-language press manipulated coverage of the San Francisco mayoral election, in order to elect Willie Brown, the favorite of the Chinese activists. Yes, the English-language press does this too, to some extent, but the point is that the Chinese speakers did not have a pluralistic variety of news sources to judge from, due to being monolingual. And that fits the activists' agenda just fine.

What was most interesting was that Brown said, "We in Oakland are blessed with this incredible diversity, but it makes it hard for people to have a sense of common purpose." The bottom line is that this new law will worsen that problem. It will be exclusive, not inclusive. Among other things, it will greatly worsen relations between the city's African-Americans and the Asians and Latinos. As I said in my op-ed, those relations are already bad, due to previous political moves by an Asian/Latino coalition, which ran up against the interest of blacks. 

Picture, if you will, a 6-year-old black girl going to an Oakland public library with her mother. The girl says, "Mom, I'd like to be a librarian when I grow up," and the mother has to tell her, "No, the Latinos and Chinese have those jobs locked up." If such a bitter scenario becomes commonplace, Oakland's "incredible" diversity will end up making the Balkans look tame.