This past week, the all-Republican Board of Commissioners in Carroll County, Md. voted unanimously to make English the official language of government business. The ordinance follows in the footsteps of Frederick County and Queen Anne’s County, making Carroll the third county in Maryland to declare an official language.
Advocates for the measure insist that it will help the county put a leash on expenditures. Commissioner Haven N. Shoemaker Jr., who introduced the ordinance last September, argued that such ordinances have become the norm, with 30 other states enacting official language laws. He added that taxpayer-funded translation and interpreter costs are too high to justify.
Considering Carroll County’s fiscal standing, the Commissioner’s argument seems to be a nonstarter. As of May of 2012, the county had a $16 million surplus in the budget, which was used this year as reserve against lowered revenue streams in the form of a one-cent decrease on the property tax rate. The 2013 fiscal year budget is up three percent from last year.
What the Commissioner fails to see is that this measure is discriminatory. Even though the ordinance excludes matters of public safety and health, government business otherwise includes information on how and where to vote, for example. To restrict this information on the basis of language is to ignore the purpose of government and the history of this country.
It is the duty of democratic government to keep residents safe and informed, as well as to maintain transparency between the people and the elected. It will be difficult to fulfill this obligation without the recognition that Carroll County, and the U.S. at large, is not composed of one homogeneous population. By including an English requirement in the citizenship process for undocumented immigrants, neither President Barack Obama nor the eight Senators responsible for compiling Monday’s plan for immigration reform seem to fully acknowledge this.
The myth that there is a uniform American culture to which immigrants must assimilate has somehow permeated the thinking of county and state legislature, prompting ordinances such as Carroll County’s. Speaking English fluently certainly presents mutual social and economic benefits, but the idea that immigrants should be forced into learning the language lest they be cut off from the life of civil society is nothing less than discriminatory.
While this measure appears to be primarily directed at the rapidly expanding Hispanic community across the nation, it affects all people who arrive in the U.S. with a limited command of the English language. The adamant refusal to understand that this country does not, and will never, belong solely to one culture or people is one that the Carroll County Board of Commissioners and our national leaders would do well to remember.
