“165,000 signatures for English in Arizona”

Our “English for the Children of Arizona” campaign just filed 165,000 signatures to qualify its measure for the November ballot, far more than the 101,000 needed.

The Phoenix press conference at which we announced the end of the signature drive and filed the petitions again attracted an excellent turnout, including dozens of Latino immigrant parents and children from across the state, willing to take a day off work and travel for hundreds of miles to demonstrate their support, wearing “English for the Children” teeshirts and holding signs with the same message.

Local media coverage was also quite good, with seven television cameras covering the event, along with numerous print reporters. The resulting story made the front page of most of the state’s major newspapers, with a solid article in the Arizona Republic and an excellent piece by the Associated Press reporter (attached below).

With this issue on the Arizona November ballot, national politicians will have a harder time hiding from it, and there’s a high likelihood that 100,000 more immigrant children will be taught English after this November.

Along those lines, I am also attaching a good piece by John O’Sullivan, editor-at-large of National Review, regarding the difficulties which this issue potentially poses for the Bush Presidential campaign.

This entry was posted in Bilingual Education, UnzColumn and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.