Voters in Nashville go to the polls today to vote on a referendum that could make the city the largest in the country with a English-only law. The ballot measure, organized by Eric Crafton, seeks to bar government officials from communicating in any language other than english.  This would prevent the city from providing translation services to the city’s growing non-english speaking population, and would put the obligation for providing such a service on the individual in need.

The city spends around $100,000 anually on translation services, but some have argued that witholding such services could be far more expensive.  The initiative is opposed by a litany of Nashville advocacy groups and businesses (see the full list here).  The Tennessean, Nashville’s major newspaper, has called for the ballot measure’s defeat.  Vanderbilt University has joined seven of Nashville’s major colleges and universities by signing a statement declaring that “this ‘blunt’ instrument — would undermine our important work and adversely affect this city known for learning and discovery.”

Polls show that the measure may come up short of the necessary votes to become law, but it is very close.

Nashville is a city speaking 80 different languages.  Immigrants from Mexico and Central America make up the largest bloc of Nashville’s non-native population, but it has also become a major destination city for Kurdish, Vietnamese, and Sub-Saharan Africans.  Should the referendum become law, Mr. Crafton and those voting “yes” will have succeeded in ending Nashville’s role as the welcoming city that it has been over the last two decades, they will have hollowed the meaning behind the city’s nickname (the Athens of the south), they will have stained that city’s reputation for hospitality, and, on this historic week, they will have sent the sense the message to the nation and to the world that Nashville sides with the nativists and the xenophobes and is not ready to move forward.  Let’s hope none of this happens, and if you’re registered to vote in Nashville, make sure it dosen’t and VOTE!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 4:37 am and is filed under Ben. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.