Obamacare Translation Policy Harms Immigrants and Natives

Contact: Phil Kent
October 9, 2013                                                                           Phone: (404) 226-3549

ARLINGTON, VA – “The announcement by the federal Department of Health and Human Services Secretary that the Obamacare insurance marketplace website has translators available in approximately 150 languages to answer questions is an outrage,” says Robert Vandervoort, executive director of ProEnglish, an Arlington-based organization that advocates making English the official language of government operations. “This policy not only wastes taxpayer money but destroys incentives immigrants have to learn English, assimilate, and become self-sufficient.”

“Anyone who is an American and who has passed the citizenship test is already required to have a working knowledge of English,” Vandervoort notes, “so why must we have these translators? This again underscores that the Obama administration is willing to spend tens of millions of dollars promoting immigrant dependency and multiculturalism in callous disregard to the interests of both taxpayers and new immigrant citizens.”

“It is a timely reminder that Congress should finally enact pending, bipartisan official English-in-government legislation which requires that all federal business be conducted in English with common sense exceptions. Thirty-one states have already wisely enacted such laws on their own,” Vandervoort notes. “At the very least, Congress should defund these costly and unnecessary taxpayer-funded translators for Obamacare.”

“The Obama administration is again catering to activist-led ethnic interest groups who have a political stake in keeping new immigrant citizens isolated, alienated and poor, while in the process diluting America’s English language heritage and weakening the melting pot tradition that is and always has been rooted in assimilation and learning our common tongue,” Vandervoort concludes.