In the United States, pressure on immigrants to learn English can be unnecessary, unproductive, and even malicious.
Before he got sick and moved in with my family, my mother’s father was working on a translation of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” As he read the pages of dense English text, he translated each line into Korean, handwriting each one onto sheets of notebook paper that piled thickly on his desk. The project satisfied him—interacting with the English language has always been and continues to be a passion of his.
My grandmother, on the other hand, has never attempted a project like this. She reads books in Korean like she grew up doing, as was her only option until she migrated to New York from Seoul with two young children and an infant in 1981. She only expected to stay for a few years—until my grandfather quit his corporate job to allow his family to make a life in the U.S. My grandma had taken English classes in high school in Korea but never to fluency, and she had no access to the English as a Second Language classes that her children took in school in New York.
“My mom had a difficult time learning English when we first decided to stay in America,” my mother said. “She had to work for the first time. Before, she stayed home and hung out with other Korean wives. Then, she had to learn what I would call ‘business-related English’ to help her survive daily interactions when she worked doing tailoring at the dry cleaning shop.”
The ability to speak English is often perceived as essential to assimilation and success in the United States. The U.S. Citizenship Naturalization Test includes English Education Requirements—basic speaking, reading, and writing are all evaluated even if the civics test is taken in a different language. And in March of 2025, President Trump designated English as the nation’s official language for the first time in U.S. history.
But learning a new language can be difficult for adults, who often struggle to fit the words of a new language into the framework of one they already know. Bilingualism and biliteracy can be a lot to ask of immigrant parents working to make lives for their families in foreign countries—especially for mothers confined to traditional roles in the home, never leaving the ethnic enclave communities that support them.
Historically, this hasn’t stopped immigrant families from establishing themselves in the United States. From the mid-1800s into the 1930s, dozens of rural immigrant communities in Wisconsin were almost exclusively German-speaking. The 1910 census found that over 20% of residents in these towns like Hustisford and Hamburg were German-only speakers, some of whom were born in the U.S. to immigrant parents.
“These folks were committed Americans,” wrote Joseph Salmons, a professor of Language Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “They participated in politics, in the economy, and were leaders in their churches and their schools. They just happened not to conduct much of their life in English.”
This monolingual experience wasn’t unique to migrants in rural areas. Ethnic enclaves within urban centers created similar environments.
“One of the reasons that neighborhoods like Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) were so important and close-knit was because of the need to build a community around a commonly spoken language,” said Ben Guess, a tour guide at New York City’s Tenement Museum, which aims to capture the experiences of immigrants on the Lower East Side. “For people living in those neighborhoods, shopping at stores owned by their neighbors, and going to German lager bier saloons and meeting halls for recreation, they might be able to live their whole lives in New York without learning English.”
Some immigrants in the late 19th century had to learn English by necessity in the same way as my grandparents and mother 100 years later—in labor-related or educational settings. “Men and children were typically the ones learning it, since they would be the ones leaving their communities for school or work,” Guess added.
The same was true in Flushing, Queens, where my mother’s family settled. While my grandfather used the English he’d spent years practicing when he traveled for work, my grandmother found comfort in speaking with her Korean-American hairstylist and grocer and friends. “Her English learning was very much hampered by where we were. We lived in a very immigrant segregated community,” my mom said.
This pattern continues today in cultures where men are expected to be the primary earners in their families. A 2022 study examined the impact of an immigrant’s gender on their ability to learn a second language by surveying humanitarian migrants to Germany, where, like in the U.S., learning the language can be crucial to assimilation. Researchers found that, even today, married women with small children were statistically less likely to be proficient in speaking German than single immigrant women. Meanwhile, family size and marriage status had no impact on the German proficiency of immigrant men. The study attributed this disparity to the fact that women working at home struggle to find the time to sign up for language classes.
In the U.S., for immigrants like these women, for whom English fluency is nearly impossible, interacting with the wider world can be difficult and even dangerous. Scarcity of accommodations for non-English speakers can leave them out of many essential government services.
In July of 2025, the office of the New York City Public Advocate published a report detailing many of these gaps in accommodations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a city Meals on Wheels program tasked with distributing information on vaccines was only ever provided fliers printed in English, not any of the other languages their constituents, largely immigrants, spoke as native languages. These immigrants were effectively denied access to crucial health information. And in the city’s homeless shelters, a series of suicides were linked to lack of access to mental health professionals for migrants who didn’t speak major languages. While these services were available in Spanish, the shelter system had no counselors or translators for migrants who spoke less common languages from the Caribbean.
Proficiency in the English language, though a requirement for citizenship, is not a requirement to live in the United States. Over 8% of American residents responded that they did not speak English “very well” on the 2020 census. And even if an immigrant speaks basic English and passes the naturalization test, they are not required to use English in their daily lives.
Today, my long-retired grandmother, like many other American grandmothers, spends her days crocheting, watching TV dramas, caring for her husband after his diagnosis, and laughing at videos of AI babies dancing. She just happens to do most of it in Korean—her first language, a language that reminds her of home—the same way that immigrants in the U.S. have been doing for centuries.
Written by Juliet Ashley / Edited by Leah Martinez
Juliet Ashley is rising high school senior who enjoys creative writing and journalism. In her spare time, she loves reading and going camping.
References:
Bernhard, Sarah, and Stefan Bernhard. “Gender Differences in Second Language Proficiency—Evidence from Recent Humanitarian Migrants in Germany.” Journal of Refugee Studies, Volume 35, Issue 1, March 2022, Pages 282–309. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feab038
Mattmiller, Brian. “Study debunks myth that early immigrants quickly learned English.” October 16, 2008. University of Wisconsin-Madison News. https://news.wisc.edu/study-debunks-myth-that-early-immigrants-quickly-learned-english/
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams. “Let’s Talk: A Review of Language Access in NYC.” July 24, 2025. N.Y.C Public Advocate. https://advocate.nyc.gov/reports/language-access-report
United States Census Bureau. “Detailed Languages Spoken at Home and Ability to Speak English for the Population 5 Years and Over: 2017-2021.” June 2025. U.S. Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/language-use/2017-2021-lang-tables.html
The White House. “Designating English as the Official Language of The United States.” March 1, 2025. The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/designating-english-as-the-official-language-of-the-united-states/
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