Congress must save DACA

Regarding Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the administration is adding a black mark to the United States. It’s not unlike the 1939 incident in which the German transatlantic liner St. Louis, whose passengers were predominantly Jews seeking to escape Adolf Hitler, was denied entry to Cuba on its way to the U.S. The decision amounted to sentencing hundreds of Jews to death.

The administration is now risking the lives of hundreds of thousands of guiltless young adults by deportation for no reason other than that their parents wanted a better life for their children and brought them to the U.S. It is time for Congress to act to save these lives.

That many DACA recipients are bilingual disturbs the naive who believe we are, and have always been, an English-speaking country. But in recent history, Spanish has been brought to New York by Puerto Ricans and to Miami by Cubans. I suspect that Joe Garagiola and Yogi Berra, when practicing baseball in the St. Louis area known as “The Hill,” often heard Italian. Further, in the 1880s, nearly half the St. Louis schools were German schools, and, most certainly, German was spoken in many small German towns surrounding St. Louis.

Mario Pei’s book “The Story of Language” reveals that languages other than English were common in the time of our founding fathers. A “knowledge of Dutch was almost indispensable New York” Pei wrote, and, in some areas, records were also being kept in Dutch for 75 years after the revolution. German was widely spoken in Pennsylvania, and many records in Maryland and Virginia were kept in both French and English. In Philadelphia, French schools outnumbered English schools and the favorite morning newspaper was Courier de l’amerique.

John Burke, Henderson