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

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

What the christ, Europeans don't understand anything about immigration. It's one thing to promote language learning programs in order to help immigrants communicate with fellow community members and quite another to demand that immigrants learn language because they "need to apply the new culture and customs close to 100%". This is an insulting and dehumanizing sentiment.

My Mom often speaks to me in Spanish and it's none of your business. If you tell me "speak English or get out", I'll tell you "chinga tu madre puto gringo de mierda". All immigrants share this sentiment, including second and third generation migrants who hardly speak the mother tongue.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

The difference is that the Jews were generally alright financially.

Current immigrants are almost entirely poorer if not impoverished.

By not assimilating, while they may moderately improve their own economic standing, they lower everyone else's.

Germany is a nice country, it's harder to stay that way if it imports large chunks of Turkey (not a nice country). The end result is going to be somewhere between Germany and Turkey, ie, not as nice as before.

America is nicer than Poland, Belorussia and Sicily. When we let those swarthy uneducated Papists and Jews into this country, we declined from superpower status to a festering sh**tehole full of crime, illiteracy and poverty. Remember the good old days when McKinley was President and 80% of our country was literate rather than the 50% that is literate today?

Do you inhale paint fumes on a regular basis? Your analysis is as sophisticated as a toddler's. Actually, I'd like to redact this point: it's very insulting to toddlers.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Immigration had no effect on our superpower status, it was WWII that did that and by that time, he had basically disallowed mass immigration.

Also, it's ironic to see a Democrat defending Gilded Age social policy.

Where did I claim that immigration propelled us to superpower status? You were the one that claimed that immigration weakens nations and this claim has no evidence. It's also quite rich coming from an fellow American, where we have a a clear understanding that immigration is a virtue rather than a vice.

"Gilded Age social policy" rescued hundreds of thousands of oppressed Jews from pogroms and constant oppression in the Old World. Why wouldn't I defend ethical immigration systems that save migrants from material deprivation and political oppression? I'm a leftist because I believe in universal human rights and think that ethnic/race based nationalism is detestable.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

All of the benefits America has gotten from immigration are actually just the "benefits" of cheap labor.

Considering that America is primarily composed of the descendants of immigrants who arrived after the mid-19th century, it borders on complete gibbering idiocy to claim that America never benefited from immigration: the vast majority of Americans would not exist without immigration.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Well, I'm not entirely sure as to how you can 'oblige' immigrants to speak the national language at home, but it should certainly be encouraged for them to do so. After all, speaking one language at home and another at work is a bit of a barrier to full assimilation on the part of immigrants.

There is no need to encourage immigrants to speak the national language at home. It's the norm for second and third generation immigrants to stop speaking their mother tongue (50-80%) without any encouragement or coercion from the state. Is this "full assimilation"? No, the descendants of immigrants will still retain many foreign customs and allegiances. A tiny portion of the second and third generation will still prefer to speak the mother tongue, especially with their parents and grandparents.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

If anything, forcing people to speak the language they speak badly at home will make their children's speaking it worse. If a child constantly hears spoken language with a strong accent/incorrect grammar, etc., s/he may pick those up. If the "badly-spoken German" transmits across generations, it might be a sign of too much German being spoken at home: it might be a dialect emerging, perhaps, afrikaans-style. In that case, if you care that second-generation kids speak better German, you should, probably, discourage their parents from speaking German in front of them.

No, that's not quite how it works.  Kids are crazy language regularizers.  They take whatever they've given and try to make it systematic.  That's how creoles are formed; kids hear a pidgin (a simple way to communicate between, say, traders), desperately seek any patterns they can, and then turn it into a fully-fledged language of its own.  In a situation where somehow the parents were the only input to the kids, you'd expect the kids to regularize whatever the parents were doing.  It might be different from the standard language (I mean, Tok Pisin definitely isn't English, and as you say Afrikaans is not Dutch), but it wouldn't be "bad" like second language speakers are sometimes "bad" (unsystematically irregular).

However, that assumes that parents are the main arbiter of how children speak, which is also mistaken.  Although parents in Western societies are often the first people who model how to use languages for children, that doesn't mean they determine everything.  This can probably be seen most easily in exceptional circumstances.  There are plenty of cultures around the world where parents hardly talk to children, yet the children learn language just fine... because they have peers and siblings speaking to them instead.  Another exceptional circumstance was the child-rearing habits of the English upper class.  Kids were basically bundled off unceremoniously into the hands of successive lower-class caregivers until they reached an age where they could be shipped off to boarding school.  Parents were encouraged to ignore their children, so the kids' primary caregivers were these lower-class folks, who presumably spoke as such.  And who did they talk like?  Well... their parents.  Because you know who else sounded like their parents?  Their peers.

This is also true in terms of immigration.  My child language acquisition professor in undergrad was a Brazilian by birth.  Her English was good, but she was clearly accented, and some syntactic things in English were challenging for her; as she put it, her input to her daughter "was a deesaster".  Does her daughter also speak accented English?  No, of course not.  Nor does she speak exactly like her dad, who's a native speaker of English, but Canadian.  She talks like her Michigander friends at school.  Cultural spread isn't parent-to-child.  In fact, we'd probably find it kind of alarming if it was.  Imagine if all of us here had the computer skills and attitudes towards technology of our parents.  Would any of us be posting here?  Cultural spread is peer-to-peer; it just happens that there's usually a correlation between the attitudes of one's parents and one's peers.

As such, to the extent that non-Germans in Bavaria speak "worse" German, it's likely just a consequence of the segregation of non-Germans from Germans.  If the immigrant population were located such that the kids of immigrants had "native" German peers, it's likely that they'd become Germans in thought, deed, and speech.  Regardless of what happens at home, once they got out into the world and made some new friends at kindergarten, they'd quickly realize the seemly thing to do would be to speak German just like everyone around them.  Undoubtedly, this tendency towards clustering around the in-group isn't just the result of the attitudes of native Germans; I'm sure self-segregation plays a role, too.  But policies like this ridiculous farce of a proposal certainly do no favors for the ideas that they're supposedly promoting.  The best way to ensure a new group doesn't talk like you is to keep driving home the idea that they're not like you and not one of you.

This is a great post!

Example of segregation/self-segregation impacting the language acquisition of immigrants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicano_English

In Southern California, Mexican immigrants and long-time Mexican-Americans were segregated from Anglos for over a century. Californios lived in their own colonias and Mexican immigrants were segregated in these communities. As you'd expect, Spanish remained the dominant language in these communities. This resulted in the creation of a unique English dialect that sounds like the Spanish-accented English of a newly arrived immigrant to the outside observer. Regardless of the ubiquitous presence of homogeneously Mexican neighborhoods in cities throughout the country, this dialect only exists in Orange County.