Small New York Town Makes English the Law
By PETER APPLEBOME
Published: May 12, 2010
JACKSON, N.Y.
Stewart Cairns for The New York Times
Roger Meyer, behind a town's language ordinance.
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It’s about 2,500 miles from this green, rural town in the rolling hills near Vermont to the Mexican border atNogales, but that hasn’t stopped Jackson from making a bid to be New York’s small version of Arizona in the immigration wars.
Or that’s how it is beginning to feel two months after Jackson — which has 1,700 people, no village, no grocery store or place to buy gasoline, no church, no school, two restaurants and maybe a few Spanish-speaking farm workers — decided it needed a law requiring that all town business be conducted in English.
One nearby town, Argyle, has since passed a similar resolution. A third, Easton, is likely to consider one at its Town Board meeting in June. The law has already put Jackson at odds with the New York Civil Liberties Union, which says it violates state and federal law. But in the great American echo chamber, every mouse gets to roar, so Roger Meyer, who proposed the law, feels he is making progress toward protecting the English language from threats near and far.
“For too long, the federal government has shirked its duty by not passing English as the official language of the United States,” said Mr. Meyer, 76, a Town Council member and retiree who runs Chains Unlimited, a sawmill and chain saw and logging supply company. “So seeing as this law couldn’t be passed from the top down, I felt I’d start a grass-roots movement to try to get it passed from the bottom up.”
The law designates English as the town’s official written and spoken language, “to be used in all official meetings and business conducted by the elected officials and their appointees.”
The civil liberties union has asked the board to rescind the ordinance.
“The English language is not under attack in Jackson or anywhere else in the state or country,” said Melanie Trimble, director of the civil liberties union’s capital region chapter.
The group said the law prohibited constitutionally protected speech and discriminated against anyone with limited English skills who tried to conduct business with the town, whether they wished to report a crime or to testify in local court or to obtain a building permit. It contains no exceptions for medical emergencies and police investigations, in which public health and safety are at stake, the group said.
Asked if, for instance, he felt the law would prohibit a flier in Spanish about a rabies epidemic, Mr. Meyer said he believed it would not. Alan Brown, the town supervisor and the only board member to vote against the law (it passed 3 to 1, with one member absent), said he thought it would.
Mr. Brown added that he saw no reason to spend taxpayer money to defend a law that couldn’t be enforced. “The law would play to some people’s prejudices, and I don’t think that’s a good thing,” he said.
One thing supporters and opponents agree on is that the law reflects no imminent threat.
“We have records going back to 1816, and they’ve never been written in anything but English,” Mr. Meyer said. “This law isn’t changing anything. It’s just making it official that we’re going to do what we’ve been doing for 190 years.”
And Mr. Meyer said the law was in support of English, not in opposition to any group. “It’s not prejudicial or anything like that,” he said.
Still, he said, he wanted to make a statement in reaction to what he believed was a movement whereby immigrants were less likely to learn English and assimilate into the culture than in the past.
“People come here because it’s better than the place they were in,” he said. “If that’s the case, you should be adapting yourself to our ways. We shouldn’t be adapting ourselves to your ways.”
The debate on the proposal was split almost down the middle, but Mr. Brown concedes he has taken some heat from his vote, while Mr. Meyer said he had received only praise.
“I walked into a restaurant in Hoosick Falls the other day and a fellow sitting at the counter said, ‘There’s the guy that pushed the English,’ ” he said. “And they all applauded me.”
People are quick to say that the few Hispanic farm employees in the area are valued workers and that there is no animus in the law. But Mr. Brown said that if not animus, there was probably something else tied to the undercurrent of unease everywhere, even in this distant, peaceful place.
“This law didn’t just pop up because someone has interest in and sympathy for the fact we’ve always done our meetings in English,” he said. “What is a human’s greatest fear? It’s fear of whatever, of death, of terrorism, fear of what we don’t understand. We’re all afraid of the unknown. My opinion is that this is just adding to all that.”
