Foreign Language Driver's Tests Threaten Safety

Most American motorists-at least those who speak English-are unaware that their safety on roads and highways is being sacrificed for the sake of accommodating an everrising tide of illegal immigration.

The issue is fundamental: Should motorists be able to read warning signs on highways, roads and bridges? Should they be able to communicate with police or other public safety officials in the event of an accident or emergency? In other words: Should people who apply for driver's licenses be able to read and understand the English language?

For most Americans the answer is yes. All our highway warning and hazard signs are in English. So it's easy to understand the danger posed by drivers who cannot read English.

However, officials in states across America are caving in to pressure from "immigrants' rights" groups to make driver's license exams and manuals available not only in Spanish but in many other languages. The predictable result is growing carnage on our roads:-

* Four Newton, Mass., teenagers were killed when their bus crashed during a school band trip. Parents of the victims blamed the accident on the bus driver's inability to understand traffic signs in English.

* A truck driver in Pennsylvania who could not read English ran into and killed a North Carolina family of five. The driver had failed to heed a warning sign banning trucks of more than 10 tons. His truck weighed 40 tons.

* A federal official in Alabama attributed a spike in work-related traffic fatalities to the fact that a growing number of drivers are unable to read or understand signs in English.

The last report is particularly troubling because Alabama should have avoided this calamity. Why? In 1990, voters approved by a landslide 9-1 margin a constitutional amendment making English their official language.

Alabama stopped giving driver's license exams in other languages. The new policy survived a lawsuit in 2001 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Alabama had the right to require that its exams be given in English.

The issue should have ended there. The people had spoken, and the Supreme Court had upheld Alabama's right to implement its official English policy by requiring that driver's license exams be in English. But during the six-year battle to defend Alabama's exam policy, the state brought back the old policy of giving driver's exams in many languages.

Five Alabama members of ProEnglish filed suit May 17 against the state, asking the court to restore Alabama's policy of giving driver's license exams exclusively in English-rather than the 13 spoken languages it offers now, including Arabic and Farsi, the Iranian language.

We hope the governors of all 50 states won't listen to the powerful and unholy alliance of extreme left-wing groups and big business that is constantly lobbying for policies to accommodate the increasing flood of illegal aliens. After all, if warning signs aren't vital for our safety, why bother with the huge cost and trouble of posting and constantly replacing them?

But cost is trivial compared to the risk that innocent motorists might be killed or injured as a direct result of having a multilingual testing policy. We pray that doesn't happen, while we wait for the courts to act.