bman

No, "some of us" didn't post various rants. You may be confused by the sheer volume of the anti-immigrant rants, but they'll all from one source: You.

Anyway, you're still wrong. Many products have packaging in multiple languages for reasons unrelated to immigration. See, there are other countries besides the US. And in those countries, people speak other languages. (The nerve!) So when a company wants to make a product for the international market, they can save money by making only one box/manual and including text in multiple languages. So your whole premise is wrong.

So you're saying that my ATM machine which now asks me which language I wish to use is a product of the bank attempting to save money?

All those signs at the gas station on the pumps that were recently STUCK on there are a result of the same gasoline company attempting to save money by printing more stickers?

So you're saying that when I call my telephone or cable company and the prompts ask me which language I'd like that they're doing this in an attempt to save money?

So you're saying that these big billboard signs advertising things in entirely different languages is being done since that very same billboard is being used across the U.S. and they're attempting to save money?

Based upon your comments above then we should just print everything in every language on every shelf in every store that might be marketed elsewhere than the U.S.?

Your logic is flawed.

He's simply saying that there are some cases (notice he didn't say all) where it is a simple case of saving money on packaging costs. Take electronics for example, most times i seem to get 4-5 different languages in the instructions and such.

And perhaps you haven't seen outside the US, but a lot of non-english speaking countries have english as other options for labeling and signs. They package stuff with english, even in pakistan a lot of the billboards and shop signs have english next to the native language.

Its simply a matter of reaching out to your customers yes. But how is that preventing them from learning the language? Last I checked, the vast majority of stuff still requires english. Perhaps the reason some have difficulty picking up the language is cause they are only exposed to their own people, so the need for english isn't quite there. They generally only get hired into particular jobs, and speaking to others isn't usually a big part of that.

It must suck to live in Canada. All of those French fuckers ruining good ole American English for all the Canadians. They should all just learn the language or go back to France. I can't imagine living there.

I bet England is just as bad. Shit - they can't even speak with a good American accent there - always butchering our language. And they have to deal with not just the French, but the Germans too! I mean... damn... Oh yeah - Amsterdam! Holy crap! All of the signs in the hash bars must be in 20 different languages! How do they deal with it?

Comparing what languages are spoken in Europe and in North America is apples and oranges. Europe is where the vast majority of people who begat the whole melting pot that is America came from. Did You all skip out on History from 1st thru 12th grades or do You not recall that language directly correlates to culture?

Europe has been multi-cultural and multi-lingual since the get-go and it doesn't take a professor to notice all the wars that take place when You have lots of different cultures trying to establish their own turf in a finite area. It only takes someone with a decent education to recall that following wars, one of the first things the victors have always needed to do is to try and stamp out the language of the culture they are trying to assimilate.

Compared to Europe, we (the USA) have had for some time a huge continent with basically one culture and one language on it. While we have seen our fair share of war, it has almost always been to aid our allies or protect the interests of our cultures. With the exception of the Civil War, our culture has never fought against itself on any scale similar to what You see taking place between Europe's different cultures.

It would be ludicrous to think that within any cohesive culture You would see wide-spread use of anything other than the native tongue except where it pertains to dealing with NON-NATIVES.

With regard to Canada, when I was growing up there were many times where the news reported on all of the political tensions between the French and English speaking regions of the country. On more than a couple occasions I seem to reports about all the efforts that had to be taken to avert Quebec seceding from the rest of Canada. In other words, citing Canada actually helps prove bman’s point.

Our country was not founded to be a recreation of Europe but to be a land where disparate cultures could merge together into one new culture. The fact that we are speaking English rather than Spanish or French is irrelevant. Even if Spain or France had had the larger control of the New World, it's arguable that the people on the western side of the Atlantic would have still broken away and formed a continent where only one language was predominant.

Turning a blind eye to history and repeating the mistakes of the past out of some warped sense of idealism that totally goes against human nature is just folly. Our technology may be more advanced but ethics, morality and (perhaps most importantly) *enlightenment* have not kept pace on *either* side of the Atlantic.

The worst part about this is that it’s not simply an academic debate. Looking to history and the current complacency of other Americans, this could very well be something that seriously weakens the country. (Rome was not invincible and neither are we.) We already had problems with an increasingly huge gap between the upper and middle-class and in the last decade or so there’s been a disproportionate swell in the lower-class due to changing economics and unchecked immigration. (As has been noted elsewhere, legal immigration for purposes of merging Yourself to the new culture is something completely different from immigrating illegally and looking only to profit from the system without putting back into it.) Guess we should just turn a blind-eye to what history says about unbalanced social stratification too…

Language directly correlates with culture, except for when it doesn't.

French is spoken not just in France, but in Haiti and several African cultures. Does that mean that culture is the same in Algeria or Port-Au-Prince as it is in Paris? Same goes for Spanish, which is spoken in poor Central American countries and in Spain. People from Barcelona can understand people from Paraguay, but that doesn't mean that they share the same culture.

I won't even bother listing the many times that two groups with a common language (and according to you, a common culture) have fought wars. Including the US.

Even if you pretend that the minor political issues in Canada amount to some kind of serious ethnic tension, it doesn't prove anything. (I'm pretty sure that the conflict between Quebec and the rest of Canada was more peaceful than the average American presidential race.) Many other countries have two official languages. Switzerland has 4 and they seem pretty peaceful.

If you're so concerned about economic imbalance, attacking immigration (specifically attacking people who speak other languages) is a really strange way to correct it. Why aren't you advocating taxes and laws that slow the rate at which the super-rich are getting richer? Or economic help for the underprivileged?

Darnit Larathiel, I was trolling Bamn - not you! :D

Speaking of history, lets bring up some fun facts. The country isn't that old, only over a couple hundred years. Most of the time we've had various waves of immigrants come to the US, and omg, they didn't all arrive speaking english right off the bat. And, they all didn't have the exact same culture as the rest of us. Usually, the first generation in learned the language, but not instantly. And they stuck to their cultural roots and habits. But over time, as new generations are born, they merge more fully into society. Trying to say we need to cutoff immigration due to different cultures/languages coming over here is rediculous, thats what has been happening since the country was founded.

What is the real issue with immigration today? There are several, main one being all the illegal immigrants coming over. A better system is needed to be put in place to regulate this. Since we've illegals here, various businesses of all sizes take advantage of this by underpaying and overworking them, because those workers can't do a damn thing about it. This trickles into then blue collar jobs being taken away from americans since they can't be exploited like the immigrants. Since they are also illegal, that add more burden into the tax payers due to healthcare costs of those people who can't get healthcare. The issues isn't what fucking language they speak or how they celebrate their holidays, its capitalism taking advantage of those it can exploit.

I'm by no means an expert in this field, but seems that we need to have some way to admit the illegals in some fashion so that they are represented in the government. Then they can be taxed, get the same benefits as americans in the work place, which then would end the exploitation of a very cheap workforce. If they have to receive the same rights as our blue collar workers, all of a sudden an employer has to evaluate the best worker to hire, not who they can hire, pay jack shit, give no benefits, and overwork for large profits. Then more tax money is fed into the system to handle the rising cost of healthcare of this portion of the population. But thats an oversimplification of the situation, I know that.

One more comment?

I work for govenment and we put out written material for public information. I recently had an area resident indignant because I didn't have a particular publication in Polish! Let's forget that its in English, Spanish, Cantanese and I believe Russian. We try, but there must be some level of reasonable expectation.