Lost in Translation: Overcoming Language Barriers for Opportunity
Examining the Impact of Low-English Proficiency on Employment, Education, and Voting Rights
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“Una Nación bajo Dios, entera, con libertad y justicia para todos.”
How can a nation promote liberty and justice for all if it cannot communicate with its citizens?
The number of Americans who speak a language other than English at home has tripled since 1980. Yet walking around most American cities, you’d think English was everyone’s preferred language--as well as one they spoke fluently. That is, of course, not the case. Twenty-five million Americans have low-English proficiency. Low-English Proficiency, or LEP, refers to being unable to speak English as your primary language or having a limited ability to read, speak, write, or understand English because of your language preference.
Without the ability to communicate easily or effectively, millions of Americans go unemployed, uninsured, and unrepresented. For example, those with low-English proficiency are 3x less likely to be insured as those who can speak English fluently, in part because navigating our healthcare system requires digging through mountains of English-only documents and forms.
Testing for the wrong thing
As long as our schools and systems of government and commerce fail to reflect our multicultural and multilingual society, we will fall short of our collective potential. By way of example, consider that eight states, including Louisiana, still require high school students to pass exit exams written only in English to graduate--despite substantial evidence that such exams disproportionately result in Black and Latino students missing out on receiving their diplomas. There is also no evidence that English-only exit exams improve academic achievement or employment rates. For LEP students, this out of date insistence on the supremacy of English can come at a cost to the individual student and their community. Nineteen states have dropped these exit exams since the mid 1990s due to these inequalities.
Louisiana provides a frustratingly stark case study. In 2019, 80% of all English-proficient Louisiana high school students graduated; yet, for English Learners, or those “who are unable to communicate fluently or learn effectively in English,” the graduation rate hovered around 41%. The state insists on having English-only exams to graduate, which disproportionately impacts those may not speak English as their primary language.
The outdated and discriminatory effect of such exams became clear during the pandemic. When several states gave up on exit exams due to the practical difficulties imposed by COVID, graduation rates for English Learners increased seven percent.
English as an opportunity for employment
Research from the U.S. Census indicated that “people who spoke a language other than English at home were less likely to be employed, less likely to find full-time work when employed, and, even having found full-time employment, experienced lower median earnings than those who spoke only English.” Wages for LEP workers were 20% lower annually and those who spoke no English at all saw their incomes drop by half. For the professions studied, farmers had the smallest nominal earnings gap while managers had the largest gap.
A multilingual education system and economy would lift up communities across the country. As evidenced by the map above, there are pockets of the country where an outdated, systemic bias toward English has caused poverty to spread where diverse, multilingual systems could blossom.
Starr County, Texas is the least English-speaking county in America. One in two residents lacks proficiency in English. One in three people there live in poverty – the median income is $31K. White students graduate at a 25% higher rate than Hispanic students.
Meanwhile, in Miami-Dade County, Florida, one in three residents lack English proficiency yet, the median income is nearly twice as high. Additionally, there is a much smaller gap in high school graduation rates. In 2019, Hispanic students in Miami had an 89% graduation rate and White students had a 93% graduation rate. Miami has embraced Spanish and also helped English become its most studied language, ensuring that students thrive regardless of their first language.
Blocking the right to Vote
Language can be a real barrier to voting, and current policies amplify those barriers.
Existing law does not go far enough to encourage democratic participation, regardless of English proficiency. The Voting Rights Act (VRA) requires that states provide language assistance to voters if more than five percent of voting age citizens in that jurisdiction satisfy a few conditions.
However, As pointed out by NPR, these "complicated formulas" for these few conditions have nevertheless resulted in millions of Americans receiving multilingual election information.
Some simple fixes could go a long way toward achieving the intent of the Voting Rights Act as well as our potential as a democratic nation. Lawmakers should lower the threshold for when such a minority group qualifies for multilingual education to one or two percent to increase the odds of all voters having the information required to make informed decisions. Lawmakers can also ensure pamphlets and voting materials are written in non-English to improve the actual ability to vote. This information can increase voter turnout and shift electoral outcomes.
The Path Forward
Just as other countries have long insisted on providing students with a multilingual education and distributing government materials in several languages, the United States must recognize that in global, interconnected world, English isn’t the only game in town.
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