by Stewart Kwoh and Karin Wang, Asian Pacific American Legal Center

Our nation is a nation of immigrants. As the children of immigrants and as lawyers who advocate for the poor and communities of color, our civil rights dream is for a nation where all Americans from all corners of the earth are equal, regardless of where they were born or how they came to the United States.

One of the great challenges to this dream is fairly simple on its face—the English language. The ability to speak the English language affects everything from simple daily activities, such as finding the right bus, to more sophisticated transactions, such as reading a contract. However, English is a complicated language and difficult to master, fraught with as many exceptions as rules. Unlike centuries past, when U.S. immigration policy basically limited entrance to Europeans, America’s current newcomers hail mostly from non-English speaking nations and in fact, many come from cultures where even the letters of our alphabet are unfamiliar. For the majority of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers in the United States, English is a formidable barrier to achieving the American dream.

As a result, language barriers have emerged as a major civil rights issue facing immigrant and refugee populations in the United States. While most new Americans do learn and want to improve their English, resources to teach English are limited or non-existent. Across the country, high demand and inadequate funding for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classes result in long waitlists, sometimes measured in years. Perhaps more importantly for us as community lawyers, the highly technical legalese used in our courtrooms and legal documents means that basic knowledge of English is no guarantee in protecting one’s legal rights.

In California alone, an estimated seven million people face a significant “justice gap”—meaning they cannot understand legal forms or documents or participate in court proceedings without language assistance. Although interpreters are required in criminal proceedings, the vast majority of legal matters—evictions, divorces, child custody battles, business disputes—occur in the civil court system where there is generally no right to language assistance.

This is compounded by the fact that a vast number of people represent themselves because they do not qualify for a government-funded lawyer and cannot afford a private attorney. Even those who qualify for legal aid assistance may find that there are few or no attorneys who speak their native language, as the need for bilingual attorneys far outpaces the supply. In addition, some communities have very few lawyers to call their own, since many newcomers become trapped in a vicious cycle where they have few opportunities to learn English and practically no opportunities to escape low-wage, dead-end jobs without knowledge of English.

This “justice gap” leads to unnecessary and sometimes tragic consequences. As community lawyers, we’ve heard stories of parents wrongly charged with child abuse who lost custody of their children or workers seeking unpaid wages who were forced to rely on the very employer they were suing as their interpreter. It also results in less obvious tragedies, like young children who must interpret for family members out of necessity, and unwillingly shoulder such weighty adult burdens as a family’s bankruptcy.

In the long-run, we believe there must be a fundamental shift in America’s policy on language and multilingual skills. To create a nation that truly values and embraces the diversity that defines it, the U.S. must adopt a more comprehensive and progressive approach to language including ensuring that all immigrants and refugees have access to basic services regardless of the ability to speak English, combined with increased resources and opportunities for new Americans to learn English and for English-speakers to become multilingual.

In a world where everything from business to politics to pop culture is globalized, America’s diverse newcomers offer our nation an unrivaled but largely untapped asset. In the U.S., nearly 18% of Americans speak a language other than English at home, but these are mostly first-generation Americans. With each passing generation, communities lose their ability to speak their native language. In many other parts of the world, the ability to speak more than one language is the norm. For example, Switzerland has not one but four official languages. And increasingly, other countries, under the tremendous pressure of globalization, are helping their citizens become multilingual—in China, more than 100 million primary and secondary school students are learning English. America’s language diversity is an asset we as nation must learn to maximize in the near future

As individuals and as a legal community, there are immediate steps we can take to help bridge the “justice gap:”

• Volunteer for clinics and cases. Nonprofit law offices like ours rely heavily on volunteer attorneys and law students to aid their clients on a range of issues from domestic violence and wage claims to immigration and deportation, and many rely in particular on volunteers to meet changing language needs. Opportunities range from the short-term, like helping at an evening legal clinic, to multi-month projects, such as taking a pro bono case. Court-based “self-help” legal programs, which aim to educate individuals to represent themselves, also rely heavily on volunteer attorneys and law students.
• Expand legal education and training. Law schools can and should prepare tomorrow’s lawyers for an increasingly global and multilingual world, which is true for both the public service and private sectors. Law schools can encourage future lawyers to gain or expand their language skills by granting credit for learning another language. As part of the required curriculum, law schools should include basic training on how to work with limited English speakers (e.g., how to work with an interpreter), perhaps as a component of existing legal ethics courses.
• Help someone learn English. Lawyers and law students can also contribute to the process of learning English. Although many ESL programs are taught by trained ESL instructors, community groups often rely on volunteers to teach English to new immigrants (e.g., as part of a civics class) and for one-on-one English-language tutoring.
• Advocate for better language policies. As lawyers and future lawyers, we are naturally trained as advocates and can lend our skills and voices to efforts to improve language accessibility to government services. In fact, many of the model policies that address language access and language acquisition needs arose through local advocacy, working with cities or counties or even the state, to ensure interpreters in civil cases, train legal and court interpreters, and create and replicate model ESL programs.

As we commemorate the birth of Martin Luther King this week, we hope that you will honor his memory by making a personal commitment to further the civil rights of all Americans. To find out how to help bridge the “justice gap” for our newest Americans, visit us at www.apalc.org.

Stewart Kwoh is Executive Director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC) of Southern California, the nation's largest legal services and civil rights organization serving Asian Pacific Americans, and Vice-Chair of the Asian American Justice Center (AAJC), which advocates at the national level for the human and civil rights of Asian Americans. Karin Wang is Vice-President of Programs at APALC.