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Immigrants, National Minorities, and Language Rights: Towards an Acceptable Normative Theory Alan Patten, Associate Professor of Politics, Princeton University, New Jersey, USA Questions about the language rights of immigrants have risen to considerable prominence in recent years. In the United States this year, Congress has been debating comprehensive new immigration legislation that would seek to stem the tide of illegal immigration while at the same time offer a path to legal status for illegal immigrants already in the country. Amongst the many provisions in the various rival pieces of draft legislation is a measure passed by the Senate in May 2006 that declares English to be the “national language” and goes on to limit the rights of non-English speakers to receive services in any language other than English. The question of immigrant language rights has been particularly vexing for countries that, unlike the United States, extend significant language rights to national minorities. In Canada, during the 1960s, when the enactment of an official bilingualism law was being debated, the single most common objection to the policy was that it extended rights and privileges to English and French but not to the many sizeable immigrant communities across the country. The same form of objection is heard in many European countries today. Why should Dutch, French, and German be official languages of Belgium, but not Arabic, which counts more native-speakers in Belgium than German? Across Europe, a number of rather small minority languages enjoy official protections of some sort, but the often much more numerous language communities formed through recent immigration do not. The European Charter of Regional or Minority Languages explicitly excludes the “languages of migrants” from the protections it offers, while at the same time encouraging protections for languages as small as Frisian, Sorbian, and Asturian. The discrepancy between the treatment of immigrant and national groups is striking. What principles of political morality could possibly justify it? Why is it not morally arbitrary to extend one form of treatment to national languages and a different, and symbolically diminished, form of treatment to immigrant languages? Or is the discrepancy just a matter of luck and power –the principle of “first-come, first-served” applied to rights? The lecture will explore some of these problems from a mainly philosophical perspective. I will proceed in three steps. In the first, I argue that, before trying to justify the discrepant treatment of immigrants and national minorities, we should pause to interrogate the usual assumption that language rights cannot feasibly be extended to all language groups. The second step will be to look at some of the standard attempts to defend the discrepancy. The third step will be to point more constructively towards a better way of justifying the discrepancy. |
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