Politics & Power Quote by Ernest Istook

Money is the opener, assimilation is the closer; the real target is legitimacy. Istook leads with “costs millions” because budgets are the cleanest moral alibi in politics: you can sound pragmatic while proposing something that functions, in practice, as a barrier. The number is less an accounting claim than a framing device, a way to make language access feel like waste rather than infrastructure.

Then comes the cultural payload: “discourages immigrants from integrating.” The verb choice is telling. It implies immigrants are passive, waiting to be either nudged into citizenship or coddled into separation, and it recasts multilingual ballots as a kind of indulgence. Integration gets reduced to a single measurable behavior: “speaking English.” That move collapses civic participation into linguistic conformity, as if voting is a reward for assimilation rather than the mechanism by which newcomers become stakeholders.

The subtext is older than the quote: English as a gate, not a tool. By tying “benefits” to language, Istook smuggles in a moral hierarchy: English speakers as full members, non-English speakers as provisional. The argument also sidesteps a basic democratic tension: the state wants informed consent from voters, yet the proposal makes comprehension harder precisely where it’s already fragile.

Context matters. This line lands in the long-running “English-only” fights and late-20th/early-21st-century debates over immigration, where symbolic issues (flags, language, holidays) stand in for anxieties about demographic change. The rhetorical trick is to present exclusion as encouragement: take away access, call it motivation.