CIS’s research director Steven Camarota, the co-author of the report, said that this means the U.S.’s current immigration system is failing to properly assimilate people from foreign countries, and those assimilation problems are carrying over into future generations. Camarota said that can be attributed to all-time high levels of legal immigration with over a million people a year admitted into the U.S. legally, and a new “tolerance” in Washington for the continued surge of illegal immigration.

“It is important to understand that the enormous growth in foreign language use reflects past policy decisions,” Camarota said. “Allowing in over one million new legal immigrants a year and to a lesser extent tolerating illegal immigration has important implications for preserving a common language. For too long we have given little consideration to whether continuing this level of immigration, mostly legal, hinder the assimilation of immigrants and their children.”

The report found there were seven foreign languages other than English that more than a million people speak predominantly inside their homes, Spanish being the most prominent at 38.4 million. Chinese is second with 3 million people in America speaking it as the primary language inside their homes; national Philippines language Tagalog is third, with 1.6 million; Vietnamese fourth, with 1.4 million; French, fifth with 1.3 million; and Korean and Arabic are tied for sixth with 1.1 million each.

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