When Language Inclusivity Goes Wrong

When I walked into the conference room of New York City’s Department of Transportation (DOT) on September 3, my expectations were high. I had been invited to a roundtable hosted by Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez for ethnic journalists, held to promote opportunities for minority- and women-owned businesses in the annual contracting fair that the agency held less than two weeks later. As a reporter working for a Chinese-language newspaper, I was excited to learn how my readers could benefit from the program.

I learned nothing. Without any advance warning, the meeting was conducted almost entirely in Spanish. I stared at the East River through the window and listened to the commissioner’s presentation delivered in a language I don’t know, wondering whether this was really the New York City DOT.

The episode reveals a broader tension. When President Trump signed an executive order to designate English as the official language of the U.S. in March, opponents warned about the prospects of governments cutting back translation services for immigrants. In a statement signed by nearly a dozen other academic organizations in the language studies field, the Linguistic Society of America said the executive order “appears designed in service of broader anti-immigrant goals, including the erasure of the history and culture of millions of people in the United States who are not monolingual English speakers.” But rarely mentioned in the debate are episodes like the DOT’s roundtable, in which an immigrant who has tried hard to become fluent in English still finds herself lost in translation.

Opponents consider Trump’s order to be the fruit of an “English Only” movement accompanied by racism since its formation in the early twentieth century. During the recent “peak woke” years, those who voiced the idea of prioritizing English even in passing could face severe consequences.

In 2019, for instance, Megan Neely, former head of graduate studies in biostatistics at Duke University, sent an email to students after two other members of the faculty asked her to identify some Chinese students who had talked to one another in their native language “loudly” in the student lounge. The faculty members sought to reduce those students’ opportunities in internship applications. In her email, Neely pleaded with the students to “keep these unintended consequences in mind” and to use “English 100% of the time” in professional settings. She had to apologize and step down amid the ensuing controversy.

In New York, where translation services remain protected by a local law, public officials have been defiant. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams’s office released a report about how the city can strengthen its language services to counter the federal reduction. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York sent a letter to Attorney General Pamela Bondi, demanding answers about how federal agencies plan to communicate with non-English-speaking people in the absence of translation services. And the city’s budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2026 allocated $3.8 million to set up community-interpreter banks and language-service-worker cooperatives to smooth communications further between the government and people who don’t speak English.

These may be necessary measures in a city where a fifth of the population has limited English proficiency. But what happened in the conference room of the DOT made me worry that the resistance has gone too far.

New York has long beat the drum against English Only. In immigrant neighborhoods like Flushing, store signs carrying no English words have been an ongoing concern—not just potentially making visitors feel unwelcome but also posing risks for emergency responders. Several elected members of the city council and state senate have proposed bills to make a change in the past two decades. None got passed.

In 2016, the city repealed a requirement that taxi drivers take an English proficiency test. And the New York Police Department has faced at least one lawsuit over its rule requiring that on-duty officers speak English unless it is necessary to speak foreign languages.

In a city where 270 community and ethnic media outlets publish or broadcast in 36 languages, ethnic-media roundtables have served to dispense information to non-English-speaking communities for years. Though most ethnic-media journalists speak English, some officials who attend the roundtables offer a few lines in Spanish to cater to the city’s largest foreign-language-speaking population.

Yet even in this context, the DOT’s roundtable took things to a whole new level. Other than the greetings and brief introductions at the outset, the entire meeting was conducted in Spanish. Even the projections on the screen during Commissioner Rodriguez’s presentation were rendered in Spanish. At some point, a sympathetic DOT employee had to pull a chair alongside me to try to translate.

 Unfortunately, I was not able to report on a conference based on the rough summary of a volunteer interpreter. Only when I stood up to leave half an hour into the meeting did the commissioner switch back to English and say, “thank you for coming.”

Are Hispanic minority- and women-owned businesses’ shares in government contracts so low to deserve the special attention from the commissioner they received? It does not appear so. A report released early this year by the comptroller’s office shows that—other than black-women-owned businesses—Hispanic-male- and female-owned businesses already have the largest shares among all minorities of the $380.4 million contracts that DOT had allocated for these businesses, as required by a local law.

The DOT’s answer to an inquiry I sent left me more confused. It noted that only two journalists at the table, including me, were not from Spanish media outlets. “We did offer individual pull-aside interviews with Commissioner Rodriguez for the two outlets,” the DOT insisted, and both “declined the opportunity.” I was not offered such an opportunity before leaving the room.

The statement also noted that Rodriguez delivered remarks in English as well as Spanish. That’s true—as far as it goes. Among the few lines that Rodriguez, who hails from the Dominican Republic, said in English at the beginning of the meeting were that he is proud to be the city’s first Latino DOT commissioner, and that “everyone is [an] immigrant.” Later, I learned with the help of a Google translation from the Spanish-language media’s coverage of the meeting that Rodriguez had also told the dozen or so journalists attending that “Latinos are no longer a minority, even if they call us that.”

The attempt to designate an official language in the U.S. is often treated as exclusionary. But a survey conducted by Pew Research Center last August found that 51 percent of U.S. adults believe it is “extremely” or “very” important to make English the official language, while another 21 percent believe that it’s somewhat important. That doubtless includes many of America’s 52 million immigrants.

When Rodriguez, as a city councilman, spearheaded the repeal of the English test for taxi drivers, he argued that they don’t need English. In many neighborhoods, he said, the drivers and the passengers speak the same foreign language. Apparently he either hadn’t considered other possibilities—a Pakistani from Jackson Heights, say, driving a Chinese passenger to Chinatown—or he believed that any driver/passenger pair could communicate in a common language that might be called “non English.”

I hope that the DOT’s Spanish language exhibition reflected a misperception of the composition of the city’s ethnic media—and not a sign that New York’s fight against Trump’s executive order is starting to go awry. As someone who cherishes the diversity of the melting pot, I would hate to see it become a Tower of Babel.

Photo by: Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images