Nashville is not the nation’s first metropolitan area to consider an English-only measure. Throughout the 1980s, Miami-Dade County operated under an ordinance very similar to the charter amendment Nashville voters are considering now. It was an experiment that didn’t work.
When the Mariel boatlift brought 125,000 Cuban refugees in the span of just a few months, local government services were strained. There was backlash in the community that had once declared itself officially bilingual. And in 1980, a referendum successfully restricted the use of county funds for communication in any language except English.
Rhonda Victor is a reporter with the Miami Herald News. She covered the English-only measure as a journalist; she also worked for the Miami-Dade government communications office during that time. Between lawsuits and pressure from businesses, she says the ordinance was quickly peppered with exemptions.
“You know, we lost a lot of time I think and progress, probably a lot of public dollars in legal challenges and the wheels of government had to grind a bit slower because everything had to be checked whether it was legal to do or not in two languages.”
During the thirteen years the ordinance was in effect, an increasing number of Hispanics became citizens and successfully sued to change the way seats were allotted on the county council. One of the first acts of the restructured Miami-Dade council was a repeal of the English-only measure.
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The anti-immigration regulations that were famously put into effect in Hazelton, Pennsylvania included an English-only clause. The entire package of restrictions was challenged in court. However, the sticking point in that case was not the language portion but a ban on renting to illegal immigrants. The small town of Oak Point, Texas, enacted an English-only ordinance, but it was rescinded 18 months later, after an election changed the makeup of the city council. Otherwise, while many small towns nationwide have considered English-only measures, few have actually enacted them.
Instead, the battle has primarily been fought on the state level. Thirty states, including Tennessee, say in their code or constitution that English is the official language, but that alone does not restrict the use of other languages.
Voters in the state of Arizona went farther, passing an English-only referendum in 1988. It was quickly challenged in court. The case dragged on for a decade, but ultimately the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously voted to overturn the law, saying it unfairly restricted access to government services and violated the free speech rights of bilingual state employees.
In the same year as the Arizona law was struck down, a similar one went into effect in Alaska. It too faced swift opposition in court, most notably from citizens of native towns and villages which primarily use tribal languages. The law was never enforced, and in 2007 the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to restrict government communications to English. It upheld another part of the law pertaining to archived documents.
A state legislator in Texas is currently pushing for an English-only amendment to that state’s constitution. Ohio’s House of Representatives passed a measure in May, but the Ohio Senate has yet to consider the bill.
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