Force them to learn English.

A lot of my clients are latino and a lot of them don't speak english.  And the majority of those who speaks english are the younger generations who were born and raised here.  Those who only speaks spanish, majority of them have been in this country for several years already and yet they have not learned english.  I blame it on the fact that our society accommodates to them instead of them accommodating to the new life here they choose to adopt.  There are plenty of spanish speaking TV stations and radio stations for them to patronize.  Many business establishments hires bilingual people.  Government offices offers spanish interpreter or spanish speaker.  Even I have to learn spanish so I can work with them.  So if I were a latino migrant on this country, why do I have to learn english when everybody else will speak spanish to me anyways.  There is no incentive for me to learn english at all!  They won't learn english, we speak spanish to them so they furthermore won't bother to learn english.  The cycle repeats itself.

Although I must concede that some of them realizes that learning english will open better employment opportunities beyond being a housekeeper, janitor, factory worker or farm laborer.  So some of them makes an effort to learn english.  I had the pleasure of working with one actually.  Her name is Maria Ortiz.   I applaud her efforts to learn english.  She has the right attitude that many of her cohort fails to grasp.  Unlike Maria, many of migrant latino just simply expects everybody else to speak spanish to them.  Even worst, some demands that somebody should speak spanish.  Yeah I have seen those kinds too.

I feel this is the problem with these migrants.  They don't speak english so they get low paying jobs.  Low income leads to more socio-economic problems.  So if I am a person who can change this, I would have them learn english.  Nobody else should be trying to accommodates to them and speaks spanish to them.  That way, they will be forced to learn english by talking in english and listening in english.  That is how language is learned.  Other migrants are forced to learn english that way.

To be fair, this problem is not unique to latino migrants.  I have seen this amongst chinese migrants who lived all their life here in china town.  They barely speaks any english despite living in America for many years.  So sad...