| Home | About Us | Archives | Contact Us |
 illions of Americans are at increased risk of death or injury on public roads because their political leaders want to provide driver's licenses to immigrants unable to read English traffic signs. Only eight states require applicants to take the driver's license exam in English, according to a study by the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, U.S. English. Every other state offers the exam in languages other than English, with some states offering the exam in as many as a dozen or more languages. That means millions of non-English speaking immigrants are eligible to legally operate motor vehicles on American streets and highways without being able to read traffic and direction signs. "It is outrageous that our leaders care so little about basic safety that they would grant a driver's license to someone who can't read English road signs," said Robert Goldsborough, president of Americans for Immigration Control, a nationwide grassroots organization that lobbies Congress to limit immigration. "Besides that, it is costly to pay for translation services, and it provides an excuse for legal immigrants to avoid learning English, pushing us toward becoming a multilingual country." The eight states that require applicants to pass the license exam in English are Arizona, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. In addition to the District of Columbia, states that offer the exam in both English and Spanish are Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia. Other states offer the exam in many more languages. New York provides the exam in Arabic, Albanian, Bosnian, Cambodian, Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Spanish, and Russian. In Rhode Island, immigrants may request the exam in Albanian, Arabic, Cambodian, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Hmong, Italian, Korean, Laotian, Poilsh, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, or Vietnamese. Connecticut offers the exam in 21 languages, including Cambodian, Farsi, Hebrew, Korean, Somali, Turkish, and Vietnamese. California, where about a third of the population is foreign-born, offers the exam in 32 different languages, including Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Cambodian, Chinese, Farsi, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Indonesian, Korean, Laotian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Samoan, Tagalog, Thai, Tongan, Turkish, and Vietnamese. "People who don't speak English do not have the right to impose on Americans the costs of accomodating them in the language of their choice. Driving is not a right," said Goldsborough. |