A prolific painter of portraits before and after the French Revolution ...

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explaining
American groups (252). Hayakawa believes this is the result of having
learned English. Hayakawa states, “A common tongue encourages trust
while reducing racial hostility and bigotry” (252). Hayakawa, one of the
original founders of U.S. English, believes that unless the United States
implements an English-only policy, we will head the way of Quebec or
India: India’s “ten official languages” have created a situation that is “a
chaotic mess which has led to countless problems in the government’s efforts
to manage the nation’s business” (253). According to Hayakawa, the
problem in the United States is already apparent. He blames the 50 percent
dropout rate among Hispanic students on the current bilingual policy (254).
Writers such as Hayakawa forecast a Tower of Babel. They believe that unless
we adopt an English-only policy, immigrants will not learn English
and U.S. citizens will not be able to communicate with each other. Of
course, Hayakawa’s analogy with Quebec and India may be difficult to support,
because immigrants to the United States have always learned English,
whereas in Quebec and India, people have always spoken different languages.
As a champion of English-only legislation, Richard Rodriguez, like
the late Senator Hayakawa, believes that without the government to push
immigrants into learning English, they will not learn English. In “Aria: A
Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood,” Rodriguez states, “What I needed to
learn in school was that I had the right, and the obligation, to speak the public
language. ...It would have pleased me to hear my teachers address me
in Spanish....But I would have delayed—postponed for how long?—having
to learn the language of public society” (270). Although Rodriguez was
born in the United States, the son of migrant workers, he was not exposed
to English until he entered school. Without his Catholic schoolteachers’
forcing him to learn English, Rodriguez believes that he would never have
learned to speak the public language (271). Like people on both sides of the
English-only issue, Rodriguez believes that to succeed in the United States,
it is necessary to be proficient in English. Because Rodriguez was not motivated
to speak English as a child, he feels that it is imperative for the government
to push immigrants to learn English by making English the official
language of the United States.
In addition, the website for U.S. English agrees with Hayakawa and
Rodriguez that without English-only legislation, immigrants will “fail to
learn English and separate into linguistic enclaves. This division of the
United States into separate language groups contributes to racial and eth-
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