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Yours
sincerely,
Daniel
Pipes
___________________________
America the
Multicultural
 Be the first of your friends to like this.
The Center
for Immigration Studies finds that the foreign-born population of the
United States numbers 41.3 million, or one out of six adults, more than
twice the number than in 1980.
There are many ways to gauge the impact of this huge increase; here's
one small but telling way:
I just received
paperwork from Independence Blue Cross (IBX) about medical issuance
options for 2015. To my surprise, this hyper-routine mailing includes a
two-sided sheet, "Multi-language Interpreter Services," that
offers "free interpreter services to answer any questions you may
have about our health or drug plan." Not only does IBX make this
service available in 17 languages, from French Creole to Tagalog to
Chinese Cantonese, but it counts English as one of them, as though it's
just another language! More than that, it even mangles the name of the
language spoken by the overwhelming majority of its users. Read it for
yourself: "Someone who speaks English/Language can help you."
Comments:
(1) Making English just another language to be interpreted points to
multiculturalism gone haywire.
(2) Subsidizing these translation services silently increases the
insurance premiums for IBX's English speakers.
(3) Why just those 16 foreign languages? Limiting myself just to the
Middle East, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish are missing, not to speak of
Armenian, Berber, and Kurdish. And if Chinese rates two dialects, so
should Arabic and Kurdish, some of whose dialects are mutually
incomprehensible. Logic requires not 16 languages but, say, 160 or even
1,600.
(4) If mundane insurance matters deserve "free"
interpretation, surely the far more important conversations between
medical personnel on the one side and patients on the other deserve
"free" interpretation too. Where does this end? (September 29,
2014)
Related
Topics: Immigration This
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