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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   18419 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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(or at least for their children to)

I thought second-generation immigrants nearly universally spoke English natively, with the possible exception of some insular religious communities like the Amish. Are there notable exceptions that I'm missing?

I flat out don't believe that based on my experience with second generation Hispanic immigrants, who data suggests are one of the better assimilating groups.

The explosion of ESL classes in public schools suggests otherwise.

What explosion would this be?

Googling around, combining this piece and this piece, I get about about 8.1% of public school students were ELLs in 2000, 9.2% in 2010, 9.5% in 2015, and 10.3% in 2020. That seems like a quite slow and gradual increase over the last twenty years - hardly worth being called an 'explosion'.

There's more data here - the vast majority, over 75%, of ELLs are native speakers of Spanish, which suggests to me that we're mostly talking about migrants from South and Central America. I'd guess that the slow increase in English language education is probably just a result of the rate of immigration from Latin America increasing.

I see no evidence that the very modest increase is driven by second-generation immigrants living in ethnic enclaves and refusing to learn English. It seems entirely understandable if it's all first-generation.

EDIT: Wait, let me get this straight.

First person makes a huge and unsupported claim in one sentence.

Second person questions that claim, providing hard data that seems to contradict it.

The result is that the first person is upvoted, and the second person downvoted? What? What happened to rationalism? I don't think I was rude in any way - I was asking for evidence for a claim.

Maybe it's just a perception issue, since my state is top 10 in ELL. The two most populous states, California and Texas, are also the two with the highest proportion of ELL students.

By gross numbers you have a 35% increase over 19 years.

As for your edit, this isn't the rationalist thread, it's the culture war thread. We're at least three steps removed from rationalism by the time you've reached here.

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