Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

38 Language Planning and Education
3.1.1 The demographics of migration and minority groups in the
United States
A new era of immigration into the United States was inaugurated by the Immigration
and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965, abolishing the national origins
quota system. 2 A major consequence has been that Asia and Latin America have
displaced Europe as the major source of migrants. Macias (2000: 17), for example,
drawing on the US decennial census, reports that whereas in the first decade of
the twentieth century 92.5 per cent of all immigrants came from Europe, the
corresponding figure for the 1981–90 decade was 9.6 per cent. The proportion of
immigrants from Asia had risen to 38.4 per cent and that from Latin America,
especially Mexico, to 32.1 per cent.
A second very significant change has been in the accelerated rate of immigration.
Whilst the US population increased by 10 per cent between 1980 and 1990, the
number of persons reporting the use of a language other than English in the home
rose over the same period by 38.6 per cent to a total of 31.8 million (14 per cent of
the national population) as against 23.1 million or 11 per cent of the national
population in 1980 (Macias 2000). Of these 31 million, the largest proportion
at 54.4 per cent (17 million) were Spanish speakers, with Mexican Americans
constituting comfortably the largest subgroup. 3
Also significant is the uneven distribution of minority language speakers across the
United States: over 50 per cent live in three states – California, New York and Texas
– with particular concentrations of Spanish speakers in Los Angeles, New York,
Miami, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area (Macias 2000; Schmid 2001).
As regards English language learners, the data is slightly less secure, mainly because
there are different definitions across the states of what constitutes an English
language learner or a Limited English Proficient (LEP) student. 4 Nonetheless, both
August and Hakuta (1997) and Macias (2000) offer persuasive evidence of a rapid
rise through the 1990s in the number and proportions of LEP students enrolled
in US public and private schools. One estimate (Macias 2000: 43) claims around
3.4 million LEP enrolments from kindergarten through to twelfth grade (K–12) in
1997, of whom 73 per cent were Spanish speakers. A more recent estimate (Kindler
2002) talks of over 4 million LEP enrolments across the mainland United States,
constituting 10 per cent of all public school enrolments K–12. Again, however, the
distribution across the nation is uneven. Gandara (1999), for example, reports that
25 per cent of California’s K–12 enrolment is Limited English Proficient with 88 per
cent of these students coming from Spanish-speaking homes. Meanwhile, states with
little previous experience in serving LEP students have also seen rapid rises in such
students, admittedly from a low base – Kansas up 290 per cent, Georgia 392 per
cent, Oregon 480 per cent (Crawford 2002). Demographic projections suggest that
this population group could constitute as much as 40 per cent of the US school age
population by the 2030s (Thomas and Collier 2002: 1).