VALUE-CRITICAL POLICY ANALYSIS 313unexamined first premises and our logic building from these premises is often unexamined as
well. Critically assessing these aspects of our policy positions can be both humbling and illumi-
nating, and may even lead to better public policy.
Once again, my value-critical analysis of the U.S. language policy debate offers an illustration.
Despite their desire to shape the public use of language toward English as our sole national lan-
guage, most assimilationists claim to want to protect the individual freedoms of non-English
speakers and their equal opportunity to realize their “American dreams.” Like most Americans,
that is, assimilationists recognize the moral validity of the individual human being’s freedom to
determine her own goals in life, and the equal worth of each person’s claim to have an opportu-
nity to realize those goals in her life. But how can we reconcile this claim to equal freedom of
opportunity with a language policy that aims to erase some languages from the public realm?
Assimilationists argue that these two goals can be reconciled easily because the equal freedom to
cultivate, use, and reproduce non-English languages is not being restricted at all; this is a “pri-
vate” right that is open to every family and/or ethnic community. That is, if individuals and
families value their culture and non-English language, they have every right to use it and repro-
duce it in their homes, religious institutions, and so forth, but they have no claim to public, gov-
ernmental support for these minority cultures and languages. Much like our constitutionally
protected freedom of religion, then, the state protects the right of everyone to practice their cul-
ture and language, but there can be no proper claim that the government is obligated to ensure that
minority languages are reproduced from generation to generation.
What is wrong with the logic of this argument?^4 Borrowing from Kymlicka’s (1989, 1995)
analysis of cultural difference and liberal political philosophy, my critique claims that the
assimilationist argument makes several invalid moves. First, assimilationists err in their premise
that the government can be neutral in respect to language. Whereas it is possible for us to make
our government wholly secular in respect to religion, we cannot have a government that is impar-
tial in respect to language use. Government without language is impossible, since it is through
language that government functions at all. Accordingly, if the government uses your language
and not my language, it is giving you a public (not private) advantage in realizing your life goals
that is not available to me. So the premises about “equal freedom of opportunity” from which we
began are being violated by this assimilationist assumption. Second, the assimilationist response
to this problem is to interject that English is clearly the country’s “real” national language and
that’s why it is so important to make English the country’s official language. Every country must
have a national culture in which individuals can realize their life goals, assimilationists argue, and
that’s why it is so important that we ensure that immigrants recognize their obligation to become
assimilated into this national culture when they voluntarily migrate to this country.
But once again, my critique argues, this assimilationist position begs the very question that it
claims to resolve. English is not the sole language of the United States, nor has it ever been. The
United States contains multiple ethno-linguistic communities that became part of the country’s
fabric not through voluntary immigration, but through conquest or purchase and annexation and
were subsequently subjected to various forms of racialized subordination. Many recent immi-
grants, especially from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, are being incorporated into these
racialized ethno-linguistic communities in a process described by sociologists as “segmented
assimilation” (see, e.g., Portes and Rumbaut 2001). As such the moral equation for “equal free-
dom of opportunity” must take this reality into account. Doing so, in turn, requires a much more
complex understanding than that provided by most assimilationists of the logical steps involved
in designing a language policy that facilitates equal respect for each person’s opportunity to
realize her “American dreams” (see R. Schmidt 2000 for a fuller description of this argument).