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US now has more Spanish speakers than Spain – only Mexico has more
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/29/us-second-biggest-spanish-speaking-country
· US has 41 million native speakers plus 11 million who are bilingual
· New Mexico, California, Texas and Arizona have highest concentrations
U.S. State Department Offers Funds to Teach English to ‘Transgender Youth’ in Pakistan
A recently published U.S. State Department grant opportunity, accepting applications through Wednesday, offers tens of thousands of dollars to English teachers in Pakistan who specialize in teaching “transgender youth,” in addition to other marginalized communities such as Afghan refugees.
The grant, first posted online in March but unearthed in the trove of State Department notices of funding opportunities by Fox News on Tuesday, focuses on English-language education in the Islamist country as a way to enhance “people-to-people” ties between Pakistanis and Americans. Titled “Pakistan English Language Professional Development for Teachers, Students, and Young Professionals,” the grant offers $500,000 in total to eligible non-profits, non-governmental associations, and other organizations to teach English in the country.
The grant sets aside up to $75,000 to split between eligible applicants who engage in “intensive professional development courses for Pakistani transgender youth from the ages of 13-25” and “intensive professional development courses for Afghan teachers, students, and young professionals residing in Pakistan.” The text of the grant announcement does not specify why Afghans and transgender Pakistanis appear in the same category for purposes of funding.
Offered by the English Language Office of the American embassy in the country, the funding aims to “improve human capacity by creating a better educated and more skillful workforce.”
“This program will increase participants’ English language proficiency, employability, and leadership and critical thinking skills, enabling them to become productive members of their community and society,” the State Department explained.
Transgender people teaching at school in Pakistan. Excluded from society, many transgender people fall out of the education system at an early age. A few months ago, a school opened in Lahore, especially for people of the transgender community, who can catch up on their missed education there. ( Murtaz Ali/picture alliance via Getty Images)
In addition to Afghans and young Pakistani transgender people, the funding is intended for “English-language teachers from non-mainstream institutions” and “novice Pakistani English language teachers.”
“English language programs are a key component of U.S. Government Public Diplomacy efforts in Pakistan, creating valuable opportunities for the Mission to engage key audiences, as well as providing lasting and meaningful professional, educational, and personal opportunities for Pakistan-based program participants,” the grant opportunity text explains. It does not comment on the signaling out of “transgender youth” as a targeted category.
Pakistan is an explicitly Islamist, sharia-ruled country, governed by a constitution that designates Islam the state religion and a penal code that prescribes the death penalty for some forms of “blasphemy.” Pakistan’s law also outlaws “homosexuality,” but protects transgender identity. As in many Islamist regimes, most prominently Iran, transgender identity is partially tolerated as a means of “correcting” homosexuals by turning them “straight.” People who openly identify as transgender can legally marry in Pakistan, but only in biologically opposite-sex unions.
“The government believes that if you are a gay man your soul is that of a woman and you should change your body,” Iranian LGBT activist Shadi Amin explained in a 2020 interview. “We think this is a way to fight the existence of homosexual people because you change their body and you solve the problem.”
Unlike Iran, Pakistan does not force suspected gay or lesbian people into gender reassignment surgery. It has also long recognized a third gender, khawaja sira, an ancient designation indigenous to formerly Mughal regions. The khawaja sira are considered a “third gender” and many do not identify as “transgender,” but a separate identity from the Western understanding of the term. The Pakistani Supreme Court recognized a legal “third gender” in 2012.
A Pakistani transgender person teaching and learning at school. (Murtaz Ali/picture alliance via Getty )
Pakistan passed a law in 2019, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, that allows citizens to legally change their gender and explicitly protects the political rights of self-identified transgender people. Given the gendered nature of sharia, depriving women of many basic political and economic rights in Pakistan, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act has complicated the implementation of such laws.
“Pakistan uses the Islamic system of inheritance, which divides assets among descendants based on their gender. Men get twice as much as women,” Voice of America explained in September. “The act stipulated that a person identifying as a trans man would also get twice as much as a trans woman.”
The law has done little to stop acts of mob violence against transgender people and khawaja sira, which is prevalent along with “honor killings” of women, mob lynchings on known Christians, and other forms of community violence. Asian News International (ANI) estimated last year that about 10,000 people in the country of about 231 million identify as transgender or third gender, noting that police often fail to act in the face of violence against them.
“The transgender community faces discrimination and killings regularly that restrict their movements as free citizens of the country,” ANI reported, “these people are devoid of their fundamental human rights including the right to life, right to education and right to have equal job opportunities as well.”
The U.S. State Department grant is one of a large volume of funding opportunities similarly targeted towards LGBT issues. In December, the agency announced a grant for organizations to “counter stigma against the transgender community in India.” Similarly, the State Department announced “freedom of expression” grants in February urging potential beneficiaries to introduce proposals with “a strong gender analysis that looks at the unique needs of women and girls, including lesbian and bisexual women, as well as transgender, intersex, and other gender diverse and gender non-conforming persons.”
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.
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Fairfax County, Virginia Presents Dire Warning to America
My home county of Fairfax, Virginia was once a safe suburban area with some of the best performing public schools in the nation. It's now a blinking warning sign to America as it hangs on the edge of complete disaster thanks to unchecked immigration and Democrat takeover of the government.
Even with the high concentration of government workers, Fairfax County was once a Republican bastion before it became a political battleground. The Bush/Cheney ticket won the county in a close race in 2000 and then lost it badly in 2004 due to a significant increase in Democrat votes.
Fairfax's descent into its current state started with a wave immigration, much of it illegal, into the area which washed away Republican political viability.
Fairfax County became a nullification (sanctuary) county in 2018 and now puts a significant chunk of money into its budget to defend noncitizens from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, although the problem started long before that. By 2015, 30% of the county was foreign-born.
MI-13, a brutal criminal gang, is now more active than ever, and the once marquee schools have started what will be a long slide through mediocrity to abysmal.
Fairfax just ranked seventh among the highest-crime sanctuary jurisdictions, ranking just below Chicago and tied with a nearby Maryland county that has had at least nine illegal alien sexual assaults since its sanctuary policy was declared in late July. That's staggering. Fairfax County now is on a list of shame with Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco.
Even apart from the rapidly deteriorating safety, the schools are sinking under the fiscal and social costs. It costs on average $15,283 to educate each of the 188,000 students in the county. That's an enormous bill, and the cost for limited–English proficiency students is likely about $10,000 higher per student.
Back in 2015, when the problem was nowhere near as acute as today, nearby Alexandria County spent over 45% of its instructional funding on limited English proficiency students.
In this context, flooding the county with noncitizens who are contributing little tax revenue must result in worse schools and far higher taxes. It's a mathematical certainty.
But the flood of new residents achieved its primary purpose, which was to make the ground here far more hospitable for Democrat politicians. Nearly 12,000 county residents were in deportation proceedings late last year, which the county is vigorously fighting in the interest of political power.
This once Republican bastion is now a no man's land for Republicans. On the single greatest day of 2016, Donald Trump was way ahead in Virginia with most of the vote counted. But anyone who dared to hope that this was still a battleground state was in for a rude awakening when the votes from the northern Virginia counties were added to the tally.
Virginia is gone. The only difference between Virginia and California is in the shade of blue. The state will trend ever darker blue barring a significant change in the voting patterns of the newer residents.
The dominoes continue to fall. Fairfax fell early, even as neighboring Prince William County remained in Republican hands. But that county is also now in deep trouble, and other dominoes will spread out from there, county by county. This is the same path that Texas is on, only it is a little farther behind.
The Democrat votes brought a Democrat school board, along with local county leadership. This meant the adoption of a policy framework called "One Fairfax" in November 2017.
"One Fairfax" is representative of what is happening across the country. A constellation of groups with backers like George Soros are active across America, subverting local governments and education. As the Daily Caller noted, these groups are already active in 33 cities and counties, covering 10% of Americans.
The "One Fairfax" name brings to mind Sauron's one ring to rule them all from The Lord of the Rings. Like that ring, One Fairfax is intended to destroy all dissent or resistance and to force absolute subservience and surrender. The key buzzword used to squash dissent is "equity," which is intended to shut down debate.
All policies are now looked at through the rubric of race and the liberal conception of social justice with the goal of absolute political power. Liberals use friendly terms like "equity" to hide their true goal, which is a complete reshaping of the county in a Marxist image, where the only thing that matters is some conception of equality of outcomes.
One can almost envision the superintendent holding a map and redrawing lines, muttering, "My precious."
The social engineering leftists of the school board were secretly plotting to redraw district lines for the express purpose of achieving equal racial balance across the schools, to include reinstituting failed busing schemes of yesteryear. They were only temporarily thwarted in this agenda when county residents grew wise to their scheme and stormed their meeting.
There is scant attention paid to actually improving the schools and equipping the teachers to deal with the challenges created by failed policies. My wife is a teacher in the county and brings home horror stories beyond belief. The teachers, who all must attend equity training, have little authority to discipline increasingly unruly kids, some of whom barely speak English, even as class sizes grow.
Even as the teachers face incredible challenges due to the bad policies that wrecked the schools, the school board recently spent an hour debating "International Menstrual Equity" in the belief that what was really hurting student achievement was that girls had to go all the way to the clinic to get free menstrual products and had to conduct a "walk of shame." This is apparently a dire problem even in elementary schools. Lack of discipline or support in overfilled classrooms? No problem. The lack of tampon Pez dispensers scattered throughout the hallways? Major crisis.
The lens of race is now the primary weapon, even at the local level, used to justify the most corrosive and destructive policies, and anyone who objects to their social engineering schemes is automatically branded as a racist.
Their "race lens" is outrageously racist, since it assumes that some races need their social engineering help. There is little difference between the schools with more resources going to schools in less affluent areas. So they are tacitly arguing that the difference is in the students themselves. They would rather move the students great distances to achieve a racial balance than focus on providing education where they live.
In the politicians' quest for power, the kids and teachers are sacrificed as pawns, left to fend for themselves in failing classes that have been social engineered into lunacy.
Fairfax is our country in a microcosm. What happened here is happening all over America. If we don't reverse the trends, both at the local and national level, the long-term prognosis on America is not promising. While the battle will rage on at the local level, Virginia is lost to the Democrats at the national and soon state level. Other states, to include Texas, aren't far behind.
Fletch Daniels blogs at deplorabletouchdown.com and can be found on Twitter at @fletchdaniels.
Pew Research: Vast Majority of Illegals, 4-in-9 Legal Immigrants, Not English Proficient
Associated Press
JOHN BINDER
28 May 2019539
2:28
The vast majority of illegal aliens and a sizeable portion of legal immigrants living in the United States are not proficient in the English language, a survey finds.
A Pew Research Center study finds that an overwhelming majority of the 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the U.S. do not define themselves as being proficient in English. Despite a slight uptick in the number of illegal aliens who claim they are English proficient, still only about 34 percent said they are proficient in English.
Likewise, only about 57 percent of legal immigrants — that is, legal foreign-born residents whom the federal government has admitted to the country — are proficient in English, according to the Pew Research study.
Illegal aliens arriving to the U.S. from Mexico, Northern Triangle countries, and other parts of Latin America have exceptionally low English proficiency rates. For example, only about 25 percent of illegal aliens from Mexico said they were English proficient.
Similarly, only 22 percent of illegal aliens from the Northern Triangle said they were proficient in English, as well a minority of 43 percent of illegal aliens from other Latin American countries.
Overall, Pew Research estimates that only about 3.4 million illegal aliens of the entire illegal alien population said they were English proficient.
As Breitbart News has chronicled, foreign language-speakers have increasingly made up the U.S. population, forcing Americans to adapt in their day-to-day lives and work environment to non-English atmospheres.
For example, nearly half of all residents in the country’s biggest cities speak a foreign language at home, according to research by the Center for Immigration Studies.
Every year, a new flow of illegal aliens either cross the U.S.-Mexico border or overstay their visas and compete against the majority of working and middle class Americans for oftentimes entry-level and generally lower wage jobs. Americans are not only subjected to this illegal labor market competition but also must compete against an additional 1.2 million legal immigrants who are admitted to the U.S. annually.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
US now has more Spanish speakers than Spain – only Mexico has more
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/29/us-second-biggest-spanish-speaking-country
· US has 41 million native speakers plus 11 million who are bilingual
· New Mexico, California, Texas and Arizona have highest concentrations
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