CSU: Immigrants should speak German at home, CDU says LOLwhat ?

[palandio]

The problem with this proposal is that it is motivated only by right-wing resentment and not by scientific (or even anecdotal) facts.

I know quite a fair number of people who came to Germany at the age of 3-8 years and who speak better German than 90% of German native speakers. And guess what, their parents always spoke Russian with them. Always. So how comes they speak perfect German? Well, their parents usually are highly educated and the children went to good schools.

Serious educational policy deciders know this. Often children with a mother-tongue different from German are given extra-courses to learn their mother-tongue properly at elementary school.
Yes, proper Turkish (/Russian/Serbian/Croatian/Greek/Italian) is helpful for proper German. A degenerate 500-word version of German is not helpful.

Sadly many politicians that are criticizing the CSU only call the CSU proposal populist bogus, and of course they are right but they don't say why.

[palandio]

I just like the idea that immigrants are encouraged to learn and talk the new language as often as they can. It only benefits them.

But that's at least two ideas:
1) "Immigrants are encouraged to learn the new language, it only benefits them."
Yes, of course it only benefits them. But it's not like if the immigrants couldn't come up with that idea themselves. I also don't get the sense of writing encouragements like this into political programs apart from pandering to resentments like "Immigrants don't want to integrate, they have to be told to do so".
2) What the CSU actually said is "Immigrants are encouraged to talk the new language as often as they can."
a) This totally neglects the value of multi-linguality and gives the idea that one can only be good at one language or the other.
b) It's again about telling other people what to do, mandatorily or not. (Same holds for those who want to abolish dialects.)

[palandio]

I won't reply to your strawman argument.

My statement is not utterly idiotic. When you are beating your children, drinking while driving and not paying your taxes, you are harming someone. When you refuse to learn the language, you only harm yourself.

Stop, you might say, you are harming your children when you don't teach them the local language.
That's an often heard argument, but it is denying reality as I said earlier. Children can easily adopt a second language at pre-school or elementary school age. Why is Mesut Özil's German so crappy, you might ask? Well, probably his Turkish is not much better and he wouldn't talk better German if his parents would have raised him in a crippled 500-word version of German.  You are 100% right that many immigrants, particularly from certain countries, have literacy problems and that is quite a big problem, but telling them to raise their children in a language that they themselves barely speak is not the solution, better teach the children a proper version of the local language in kindergarden. They will learn it within a year, under the condition that the majority of the other children is not from the same background.

[palandio]

Well, the whole argument has been derailed a bit.

There are indeed some fears regarding a heterogenous society that cannot be entirely neglected: Conflicting loyalties, "parallel societies" with incompatible moral and political values etc.

But I think that children not learning their parents' mother tongue (that's what your approach is about, as far as I understand you) won't help in any regard. It might even harm them, because if their parents don't speak the local language properly, many children will only have come into contact with an inconsistent, reduced, expression-poor and grammar-poor language until they go into kindergarden.
I agree with you that immigrants should learn the local language and eventually adapt basic values compatible with the new environment. I just think that your proposal won't help.

In my opinion the language question is neither the problem nor part of the solution.
1) There is indeed a cultural problem with some immigrants. You see that it is not a linguistic problem because there are quite a lot immigrants that are culturally similar or assimilated but still bilingual.
2) There is a social and literacy problem not only with some immigrant communities, but also with parts of the growing non-immigrant lower class.