Language Access Initiative (LAI)

In keeping with its mission, the NFLC launched the Language Access Initiative (LAI) in 2004 to address the growing need for language assistance in the United States. The NFLC has long been party to national efforts to meet the need for oral and written communication skills in languages other than English. Our focus has included enhancing Americans' knowledge of foreign languages and cultures through a variety of pedagogically rigorous foreign language learning and training tools and programs. Broadly speaking, we sought to make the non-English speaking world more "comprehensible" to Americans. Our current initiative, by contrast, seeks to make the U.S. itself more comprehensible to the legions of Limited English Proficient (LEP) new immigrants in need of fundamental services. This involves, specifically, development of tools, services, and policies to vastly expand interpretation and translation capacity as well as language-sensitive recruitment, training, and management initiatives.

The NFLC Language Access Initiative is intended to complement and advance efforts already underway across the U.S. to comply with federal and state language access laws and regulations. These laws and regulations have been a necessary response to the increasingly pressing need for language services of a skyrocketing LEP immigrant population. Federal, state, and local government agencies have scrambled in recent years to develop language assistance plans, hire language access coordinators, and train and/or contract foreign language interpreters and translators. Beyond government agencies, the health care sector has been particularly active in the search for ways to meet the needs of non-English speaking patients. In health care, communications failures can have dire consequences.

The NFLC projects will thus focus first on the critical health care sector as it struggles to meet the interpretation and translation needs of its LEP client pool. This will involve:

• Organizing and participating in key stakeholder coalitions across sectors;
• Identifying and assisting in the dissemination of information on model programs, "best practices," and new technologies in the medical language access field;
• Researching the reasons for ongoing problems and deficiencies; and
• Developing tools, programs, and services to effect national solutions.

The NFLC Language Access Initiative will consequently emphasize both policy development and active intervention in an effort to expedite solutions.

Demography and Language in the United States: A Brief Overview

Although federal and state mandates have spurred much of the recent activity in the language access field, "facts on the ground" have proven decisive. The U.S. is in the midst of an immigrant population boom similar in scale to the previous boom of some hundred years ago. In the 1990s alone, the foreign-born population grew by a staggering 57.4 percent, thereby increasing the size of the foreign-born population in the country to more than 31 million people, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. The Population Reference Bureau has estimated that roughly one third of overall U.S. population growth results from net migration. With a U.S. Census Bureau-predicted population size of 403,687,000 people by 2050, this suggests that the U.S. may well receive an additional 50 million new immigrants over the next fifty years.

What these figures mean may well be deduced from the recent experience of California, the most populous state of the union with some 33-37 million people. For the first time in history, as the most recent census revealed, "non-Hispanic whites" had become a minority group within the state, making up no more than 47% of the overall population. With Hispanics representing one in every three residents and a large and still growing Asian population, California has now become a region in which every resident is a member of a "minority" group.

Traditional immigrant settlement patterns, moreover, have also been changing, creating challenges for regions unfamiliar with the needs of new immigrant groups. While over two-thirds of the foreign born continue to reside in the six traditional "gateway" states of New York, California, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and Illinois (over half in just eight metropolitan areas), increasing numbers of immigrants – made aware of new job opportunities by way of improved global communications – have moved to "non-traditional" states in the south and midwest. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Arkansas, Georgia, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Tennessee all saw their Hispanic populations double in the 1990s. "Unlike the traditional receiving states, these states tend to have little experience or infrastructure to respond to the language and cultural challenges of the new arrivals."¹ A recent report by the Brookings Institution also noted the linguistic and cultural challenges facing such regions. "The impact particularly at the metropolitan level," reports Brookings demographer Audrey Singer, "has been great as many cities and suburbs have had to adjust to new populations that place immediate demands on schools and health care systems, particularly with regard to language services."²

In short, the Limited English Proficient (LEP) population has doubled over the last twenty years from 6% to 12% (some 25 million adults). And forty percent of foreign born children also have difficulty with English.³ This has placed enormous strains on many public and private services organizations. The NFLC Language Access Initiative will seek to ease these strains, so as to promote – as our founders once wrote – "the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty."

The NFLC LAI Contact: Diane DeTerra, Ph.D

¹ Ann Morse, Immigrant Policy Project, National Conference of State Legislatures, "Demographics and the 2000 Census: A Quick Look at U.S. Immigrants" (January 30, 2002).

² Audrey Singer, "The Rise of New Immigrant Gateways," Living Cities Census Series, The Brookings Institution (February, 2004), 2.

³ Morse, "Demographics."