The New Yorker:

Donald Trump’s executive order succeeds where decades of right-wing efforts have failed.

By Graciela Mochkofsky

Of all the reasons my husband and I decided to make New York our home twelve years ago, when we first arrived from Argentina, the city’s linguistic diversity was a major consideration. Spanish, our mother tongue, was ubiquitous, and dual-language education for our then two-year-old son was easily available in preschools; he is now learning his third language, in middle school. We soon built a community of friends in which almost everyone was bi- or multilingual, speaking, at home, many varieties of Spanish, from Peruvian to Colombian, from Mexican to Dominican, along with Russian, Hebrew, Mandarin, French, Turkish, Hindi, and Arabic—and English was our lingua franca. Hanging from a wall in our home office is a framed map of Queens, titled “MOTHER TONGUES AND QUEENS: THE WORLD’S LANGUAGES CAPITAL,” which a friend (whose mother tongue is Jamaican Patois) printed out for us from the book “Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas.” It identifies where various languages are spoken in the borough—the most linguistically diverse urban community in the world—including Coptic, Quechua, Tepehua, Tlapanec, Finnish, Pashto, Ibo, and many, many more. For someone like me, raised in another country of immigrants, with one grandmother proficient in Guaraní and the other in Yiddish, my new country felt immediately familiar and welcoming.

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