Jon Christian Ryter -- Whose Fault is the Language Barrier?

WHOSE FAULT IS THE LANGUAGE BARRIER?
PART 1 of 2

By Jon Christian Ryter

August 2, 2006

NewsWithViews.com

In its current edition, the New England Journal of Medicine observed that many hospital patients in the United States are put at risk because they don't speak English and, thus, can't communicate with medical professionals when they are sick or injured and end up in an emergency room or trauma unit. The tone of the article suggested the fault for this dilemma lies at the doorstep of the hospitals and medical care facilities that don't provide translators for illegal aliens and English-deficient aliens here on student visas or green cards.

In May, 2005 the Council on Foreign Relations put together a North America Community Task Force that was focused on seamlessly merging the peoples and economics of the United States, Canada and Mexico into a North American Union. What that means is that, under the terms of the trade agreement signed by President George W. Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, Bush can't seal the American borders. The triparte agreement between the three nations contains an "open skies and open roads" clause that requires each nation to have free access to the other two. To go along with this "openness," a biometric triparte border pass (i.e., an tri-national ID card) is being developed to guarantee North American citizens effortless access to the North American continent.

If you want to blame someone for the language barrier, you might blame President George W. Bush whose internationalism has put him in a position where he can't enforce the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. In six years, Bush prosecuted exactly four business owners for hiring illegal aliens. When Congress authorized the hiring of 8 thousand new US Border Patrol agents, the Bush Administration hired 200. And, Bush has done nothing to secure the borders, leaving the Southern door wide open for any terrorist touting a belt-load of explosives to walk right into the country like a welcomed guest. Or, you could blame former co-presidency of Bill and Hillary Clinton who, to get 5 million brand new Democratic voters in 1996, illegally waived US law and allowed 5 million Hispanic and Oriental alien residents to take their citizenship examinations in their native languages even though US law requires the test to be taken in English only. Or, you can blame the globalists who have been trying, since 1920, to create global government. Studying the unraveling of the societal thread of the Soviet Union, experts decided that the Soviet Union collapsed largely because the Kremlin was never able to assimilate those they forcibly absorbed through conquest.

Over 83 years those conquered peoples were ethnically, culturally and linguistically separate from the ethnic Russians. As captives, they had no interest or desire to be assimilated into the Soviet society. For that reason, absorbing conquered people was a problem for Vladimir Lenin in 1920, and it continued to be a problem for every Soviet leader through the history of the Soviet system�and it remains such today even though the former captive satellite countries are theoretically independent nations.

National separatism grew over the years, making it even more difficult for the Soviet bureaucracy to manage its deeply troubled economy. Compounding the economic dilemma of the Soviets was the need of the Russian oligarchs to buttress their occupation garrisons in most of the captive nations under their control with costly occupation-strength armies, further aggravating their financial woes. Efforts to assimilate the captive people met such resistance that Josef Stalin was eventually forced to make his commissars and the bureaucrats assigned to rule the captured lands learn the language of the conquered people. As a result, those captive ethnic groups retained not only their own languages, but their cultural diversity as well. The problem did not get better with time. National unity was never achieved. Ethnically, these diverse groups remained ideologically linked with the cultural moorings of their separatist pasts.

From the Soviet failure at assimilation, the utopian ideologues who want to collapse the American republic learned a valuable lesson that would pay huge dividends over the next 50 years. Diligently the liberals worked unobtrusively within the societal structure of America using ethnic separatism and cultural diversity as an inherent right of minority races to weaken and ultimately destroy the fabric of patriotic unity in America, one thread at a time. Ethnic and cultural separatism will prove to be the Achilles Heel of this nation of immigrants. Separatism will destroy the fiber of national unity in America through the deliberate fractionalization of the people of the United States into subcultures within the social structure of the nation.

This has largely achieved over time not by promoting America as a nation of free men unified to protect the inherent rights of each other so they can work together to keep the nation strong, but as a multi-lingual, multicultural society in which diversity, not unity, is encouraged not only as a right but as a cultural obligation. This obligation�the official agenda of government�was actively pursued by Hillary Rodham Clinton in the opening months of the Clinton years when the most powerful woman in America went on the record on Nov. 11, 1993 and said: "When middle class whites flee from an area that has a significant African-American population...[they perpetuate]...a vicious cycle wherein tax money is no longer available for our entitlement programs. These whites are practicing an intolerable elitism when they moved into moated communities with fences and guards. This is an offense to the African-American and Latino communities. It's the same sort of thing as whites taking their children out of public schools because of what they perceive are dangerous conditions...I think that all housing projects, regardless of the price of the units involved or the location and regardless of whether these units are public or private in nature, be mandated by Federal law to provide 25% low-cost minority housing. Perhaps then the elitists would be forced to come to grips with the plain fact that this is going to be a multicultural, multiracial country very quickly, and we are not going to tolerate or perpetuate defacto segregation." Read: Whatever Happened To America.

The last ten UN Global Summits gave high priorities to pushing its multicultural and multiracial agenda in the United States in order to create a blended societal homology in the United States that is neither black nor white, yellow or tan, rich or poor, theist or atheist. What has happened along our Southern border since 1990, and the lack of interest on the part of the Clinton and both the Bush-41 and -43 administrations to secure our borders and halt the influx of illegals into America.

The New England Journal of Medicine noted that in the last decade of the 20th century, the number of non-English speaking residents in the United States grew by over 7 million�up to 25 million. Ninety percent of them, or more, are illegal. Those without a basic proficiency in English were not just Mexican. Many are Vietnamese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean and, surprisingly, Russian. Non-English speaking residents in the United States total about 8% of the population.

Several studies done by minority rights groups studying language barriers in American healthcare facilities suggested that few, if any, hospitals regularly employ staff interpreters and rely, instead, on minority employees to communicate with injured people coming into their emergency rooms. The purpose of these "studies" is to create a catalyst that will pressure Congress into enacting a law requiring healthcare facilities to provide translators for every language and/or dialect spoken with the trade area serviced by those healthcare facilities.

The article's author, Dr. Glenn Flores, MD, FAAP, is a pediatrics professor at Medical College of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he is also Director, Center for the Advancement of Underserved Children. Flores is a former Robert Wood Johnson Minority Medical Faculty Scholar and Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. Gen. Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. whose wealth finances the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was the son of the founder of Johnson & Johnson. Johnson, a Freemason, was the 64th wealthiest man in America. He was politically involved in minority medical issues until his death in 1968. In 1998 the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation financed a secret project for the Clinton Administration to keep it off the public radar screen�funding biometric healthcare cards containing tracking chips for an experimental welfare program called Health Passport in North Dakota, Wyoming and Nevada.

The Smart Card technology was used to create not only a medical database on the families of welfare recipients, but a complete history�including a history of mental illness and criminal activity. Not exactly the type of information a doctor needs to know if a welfare child's inoculations are current. The GPS tracking chip in the Health Passport card allowed authorities to physically track the whereabouts of the cardholder�and track them the Department of Health and Human Services did, for four years. Since the poorest Americans are the most transient, the tracking card provided DHHS with the migratory pattern of the card's recipients.

Flores' language barrier advocacy is an agenda-driven program with an objective. At the end of that objective is the dissolution of America's borders, the assimilation of minority races into our society and, ultimately, subjecting the American people to not quite willing membership in a global society governed by not the quite democratic laws of other nations. Flores, who has been an advocate of minority issues for most of his professional life, correctly noted in the Journal of Medicine article that patients who cannot communicate their symptoms are at risk.

Flores noted that the lack of interpreters translates into impaired health care and the likelihood of the patient not being given a follow-up appointment�or their keeping it. Flores is correct. People who can't probably communicate their symptoms may be treated for something that does not afflict them. People who don't understand English will also likely have difficulty understanding how to administer the medications prescribed by an English-speaking doctor and filled in an English-speaking pharmacy.

He also cited a case in Florida where an non-English speaking Hispanic 18-year complained of being nauseated. In Spanish, the word for nauseated is intoxicado. The emergency room doctor heard the word "intoxicated," and thought the young man was telling him he was drunk. Thirty-six hours later the hospital realized he had a brain aneurysm. The hospital settled the malpractice suit for $71 million. The youth ended up a quadriplegic.

Flores also reported on an incident in which non-English speaking parents took their 10-month old daughter to a pediatric clinic because she seemed listless. The infant was diagnosed with iron-deficient anema. The doctor gave them a prescription for Fer-Gen-Sol iron, 15 mg per 0.6 l, 1.2 ml (3.5 mg) daily. The pharmacist�who spoke only English�used a medicine dropper to show the parents how to properly measure the dosage. The label on the prescription bottle was written in English. Within 15 minutes of administering the first dose, the 10-month old vomited twice. The parents rushed her to the closest emergency room which it was discovered the baby was suffering from iron poisoning. Questioned by hospital personnel, the parents said they gave their daughter a tablespoon of medication�about 43 mg, or about ten times to prescribed dosage.

These and hundreds of other healthcare-related language barrier incidents are tragic, but the solutions proposed by the utopian bureaucrats are even more tragic. The utopian solution is to force businesses to hire interpreters, print all government regulations in the 101 known languages and dialects spoken in the United States, and force manufacturers to use multilingual packaging. And, of course, printing street signs in several languages to accommodate those living here who don't wish to be assimilated into the American society. Although it would be viewed by the liberals as politically incorrect, we need to mandate that anyone entering the United States be required to learn English before they can become a citizen (as required by US law).

The decision to educate Hispanic children in Spanish and not English, and children from other countries in their native language rather than English is not the choice of their parents who clearly understand that for their children to become part of the American dream, they have to be assimilated into the society, not a subculture on the fringe of that society. It's a utopian decision by bureaucrats who want to use the offspring of the world's human capital to fracture the patriotic bond of America, and drive the wedge of mistrust into the population in order to divide the people of the United States to make it easier to conquer them.

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If I chose to live in Mexico City, Berlin, Paris, Seoul, or Beijing it would be incumbent on me to learn the language because it's a bankable certainty that the Mexican, German, French, Korean or Chinese governments don't feel obligated to provide interpreters for me at the expense of their taxpayers. Nor would I expect it. Why should those who decide to come here�especially illegal aliens�expect to be accommodated with what amounts to as a free ride at the expense of the overtaxed American taxpayers? Because that's what the engraved invitation says. For part two click below.

Click here for part -----> 2