Nick Griffin
Subject: Requiring English
Bio: Author of The Year of Dangerous Days: Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in 1980 and Writer of English Only
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s topic is Requiring English.
Our speaker is Nick Griffin who is the author of The Year of Dangerous Days: Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in 1980, and he spoke about that book on a previous podcast. Today, Nick is going to speak about his new play English Only which had its opening run at the Colony Theater in Miami Beach.
In 1980 125,000 Cubans arrived in Miami in two months and many of these new Spanish speakers were not fluent in English and that frustrated many native Miamians.
I want to discuss with Nick the importance of English being the lingua franca in the US and whether the government should encourage its use by recent immigrants.
Nick, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Nick Griffin:
A few years ago, I wrote a book called The Year of Dangerous Days set in 1980 Miami. There are three extraordinarily large events that happened in Miami in rapid succession. The biggest race riot in American history, the industrialization of the drug industry, and the largest single burst of immigration directed at a single city, which was the Mariel boat lift. Miami at that point was roughly 300,000 people, and in 2.5 months they got another 125,000 people from Cuba.
It is Jimmy Carter’s last disastrous year. Inflation’s running at 20%. There are no jobs, no room in schools, no spare apartments. People are literally sleeping under I-95. It is a crisis for the city.
The Cubans were stepping into what was already a bilingual city. Miami had been declared bilingual in 1973, so 7 years prior, and no one had uttered a peep. And yet suddenly it becomes a hot topic when it’s followed by this large wave of secondary immigration. There’s a nativist reaction to race, drugs and immigration. The reaction is against the weakest and least politicized newly arrived Cubans.
Only in Miami is the anti-immigration movement is led by an immigrant. She is an extraordinary character who speaks six languages. Her name was Emmy Shafer and a survivor of the Holocaust. What sparked her movement was walking into a mall one day and trying to buy a dress for her daughter and not finding anyone who could speak a word of English. She starts a ballot initiative to get an ordinance on the November election, which will also be the Reagan versus Carter election. Her idea is that to revoke Miami’s standing as a bilingual city.
That was the story of what I wanted to do in the play was to have Emmy Shafer on one side and a shocked Cuban organization on the other side. The Cuban immigrant community was successful. They had resurrected downtown Miami. They connected North America and South America, and the city was thriving in those last years of the seventies.
But Miami goes from being the poster child to the ugly duckling within months. One thing that does not happen is federal help for any of these issues. No help in immigration, race riots and combating cocaine. And that’s the context in which this anti-immigration movement starts.
Larry Bernstein:
I moved to Miami in 2020, and the first thing I did was get a driver’s license at the DMV in Hialeah, a very concentrated Cuban community. I was one of the only native English speakers in the DMV. I got hungry and there was a Cuban diner a hundred feet away. They handed me a menu in Spanish, and I said, “do you have a menu that has English?” “No, we don’t. Tell me what you want?”
A Cuban sandwich and a decaf coffee, please?” I can get it done, but I can imagine the frustration for people who want to buy a dress with basic customer service. I rolled with the punches, but I could see walking out in frustration.
Nick Griffin:
It is unnerving. Arriving in Miami International Airport, there’s bilingual signs everywhere. Despite nativist movements like English Only, in 1980, 60% of Miami households spoke a language other than English at home. In 2026, that number is 70%. It’s worse than it was.
There’s a nonprofit called SALAD because the theory in Miami is that we’re not a melting pot. We are a salad bowl that we are distinct ingredients that live next door, but we’re not properly mixed. Little Havana is 96% Cuban. We self-segregate.
Larry Bernstein:
In 1980, Miami was a classic southern city. It was white and black when there was this influx of illegal Cuban immigrants. There were positive and negative consequences. The positive was it reinvigorated the city and Miami became the capital of Latin America. But the negative consequences were that it blew up the schools and a huge surge in crime. South Beach became a series of SROs. Overnight, white and blacks were in a rear-guard action.
A.O. Hirschman the famous Harvard economist wrote a book called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. In that book he said, when an individual or a subgroup in a population is unhappy with public policy, they can scream and yell, and they can create a political movement if they want to change policy. But if they cannot, then they can exit, they can leave.
When there was a mass immigration of a foreign population, your choices are I like my life the way it is. I like a school that offers predominantly English. I like having safe streets. I do not like having homeless people in my yard. I will leave if I cannot succeed politically. And they did leave. Whites and blacks left Miami predominantly for Broward County, which is not that far away, but with traffic, it is impossible.
Whites left for safety and blacks left for new jobs that paid more because of competition from Cuban workers. Tell us about voice and exit.
Nick Griffin:
It becomes a minority majority city between the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1981. It’s a sudden shift. It creates an enormous amount of white flight and the Latin population brushes towards 60%, which is fairly staggering considering that it was 5% in 1960. I remember the Mayor of Miami being interviewed in 1980, and they asked if the boatlift is going to change Miami. And he went, not really, just in the same way the Irish changed Boston. He is teasing the press, but you look back at anti-Irish immigration laws passed in the 1840s and 1850s; it is similar.
They don’t necessarily target you because you’re Irish because they don’t want to say that out loud, but they target you because you’re Catholic. They target you because of anti-poverty laws. But guess who are the poorest people in Boston in the 1840s? They even have an Irish deportation movement in the 1850s. So there’s no doubt that immigration changes the flavor of cities, there is absolutely no hiding that. And if you decide to run for the hills, then you change the hills as well.
Larry Bernstein:
Bilingualism, talk about what that means. The state cannot prevent the speaking of Spanish in the home. What they were referring to was public documents predominantly. After I got my driver’s license, I went to City Hall to vote. The form was in English as well as in Spanish. I cannot read Spanish, so I read it in English. This is a minor matter that does not change our life. How do you feel about bilingualism for official documents?
Nick Griffin:
I do not think it is the real point of the fight. It is the entry point to talk about immigration. Just two weeks ago, Florida passed a new law to have the Florida driving test only in English. Now, the incident that sparked that change was a Hindi speaking driver not being able to read signs and causing a huge crash with his truck. But there are less than 1000 Hindi people in Miami-Dade. And yet, the first language it was aimed at was Spanish.
I do not think English Only does much. It might spur people into learning English a little bit quicker. There was frustration in 1980 because they saw money was not spent on hurricane warnings and voting documents. They were using public money to do things like the Cuban parades and felt like favoritism or a waste of money.
What was fascinating was in those first days after the English Only Vote passes is that you get this sudden surge of attempts by private companies like Burger King for about a week or two, they try and enforce that Spanish shouldn’t be spoken in the workplace.
Announcements by companies to say, “That’s it! No more speaking Spanish in the workplace,” but it lasts maybe a couple of weeks. Employees do what they want anyway. It didn’t matter. The culture does what the culture’s going to do and pass as many laws as you want.
Larry Bernstein:
There were two massive waves of Cubans to Miami. But since then, there have been waves of other Hispanic populations: Venezuelans, Brazilians, Argentines, and Colombians. There are people from the Dominican Republic, El Salvador. And when you look at the demographics of Miami, Cubans were important but now it is one of many different communities of Hispanics.
Nick Griffin:
Many of these Caribbean, Central American and South American immigrant communities have in common is none of them thought they were staying long. When you look at registration to vote in 1980 for Cuban Americans, it’s 17%. Why? Because they thought Fidel was going to fall any day.
You are now going to have an interesting test case with the capture of Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela and the green shoots that seem to be starting to grow in Venezuela. I spend a lot of time with Venezuelans because my wife’s Venezuelan, but I would say 80% would like to get back there within the next one to two years. A lot of them see this as a chance in a lifetime they can rebuild an entire country.
That is going to be a fascinating test of what America means and whether it is a temporary stop and that you are going to get this return of immigrant communities.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to go back to language. In the early 1900s, Nebraska passed a referendum banning the use of German in schools. It had a large German influx, and the people of Nebraska felt that English was the official language.
My mother grew up in Skokie, Illinois, and it had a very vibrant Jewish community with a lot of Holocaust survivors. But today, Skokie is home to a diverse population. 60 languages are spoken in the local high school. Imagine the staff trying to cope. It is one thing if 70% of the students speak Spanish, it’s something else entirely when we have 60 languages.
That goes to the heart of this language question. It’s not that big a deal about the voting ballot or a driving test with 30 questions that are pre-assigned, but the local school having to deal with this situation. How should we think about language and schools, which goes to the core of your play, which is should English be the official language?
Nick Griffin:
Every country needs a lingua franca, and it’s obviously English in the United States. Yes, there are famous stories in Miami of people who come here and 25 years later have not learned a word of it. But let’s be honest, those tend to be all the arrivals who aren’t necessarily stepping into the workforce. You’re going to encounter thick accents all over Miami, but you will find English with 90% of people.
If you are planning to live your entire life in Miami, you could probably get away with bad English, but you’re going to limit where you get ahead. Everyone wants their children to succeed.
We have seen this play out again and again where thick accents parents and then the young people can’t wait to embrace America.
I remember talking to the ex-mayor, Maurice Ferre and I said to him, this city’s now been majority Latin for 60 years, and this is the way it’s going to be. And he vehemently denied that. The idea of America is much stronger and better than any other division and it is going to overcome. He thinks it may last a century and we’ll end up pretty much looking like the rest of the country, but maybe the rest of the country begins to look like us.
Larry Bernstein:
Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown met with his constituents and one elderly woman said that she went back to the area where she was raised in London, and it was filled with immigrants, and she could not communicate with them. And her old community was gone and she was saddened by it, but she had exited that community and wondered what Gordon Brown thought about it, what he could do about it to let England be England.
Gordon Brown answered it, and there was a hot mic and he said that woman’s a racist and it caused a big hullabaloo. It was very damaging to Gordon Brown. He later reached out and apologized.
When you said that Miami went to 70% Cuban, it was a Cuban city. It will have the values of Cuba with its language, cultural heritage, and you can love it, which I do, and that is why I moved here. But other people may not, or they want it the way it was.
What that woman was saying to Gordon Brown was, I like England, you said we were going to limit immigration to something reasonable so they could assimilate, but immigrants did not assimilate at all. What are we going to do to encourage assimilation? And one aspect of assimilation is language. Latins are part of the Christian cultural heritage. That is not the case of what is going on in Europe currently, and that is another hot button. What do you make of assimilation as a core goal of the American project?
Nick Griffin:
The key thing you must remember is that Britain’s very much a welfare state. If you do not pay in, you can’t take out. England’s ideal immigrant is a Portuguese woman because 98% of them get a job within the first year that they arrive in the UK. Your worst immigrant is a Bangladeshi woman because 66% of them do not get a job within their first five years of entering the UK. This put enormous stress on the UK’s welfare system.
People do their best not to go to hospitals in England. I go to England every three months. I have elderly parents and have had to deal with the hospital system a lot over the last two years. It’s depressing compared to when I was a kid. It is under severe pressure. England has been taking over a million people a year for many years in a row. They have not been successfully integrated into society. And that holds true across different countries in Europe. We are in a different position than America. The US is a country built on ideals of you eat what you kill, and your insurance is tied to your private job. You are not leaning on a welfare state.
If you are going to come here and expect government handouts, that is not going to be anywhere near the degree that it is in most European countries. It’s a different issue here. Latin culture and American culture seem to have plenty of intersection points, so it does not worry me. I am extremely comfortable in Miami, but I can see why it’s unnerving to many people. It’s much more unnerving to think that your entire welfare system could fall apart any second.
Larry Bernstein:
In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary sets the conditions for illegal immigrants to get on the path to citizenship. And one of the requirements that gets the biggest cheers from her Democratic audience is the desire for those immigrants to learn English. What do you think has happened? Why has the Democrats decided that learning English is no longer a prerequisite?
Nick Griffin:
The movement in politics over 16 years is incredible. You’ve got one party that barely believes in national boundaries at all. And the other party thinks that America should cease to be the city on the hill. It is lonely in the middle.
Larry Bernstein:
After the end of your play English Only, there was a discussion with the audience, the cast, you the playwright as well as the assistant director. It used to be the play ended and you went home. Nowadays the play does not end with the final scene. It is just the beginning of a conversation. I was amazed by how many people stuck around. The theater looked like it was at 80%, talk about that discussion and the role of this post-play environment in modern theater.
Nick Griffin:
I do not love the whole talk back stuff. My theory in life, if you buy a book, read the book and make up your own mind. You go and see a play, go out with your friends afterwards, and if you want to argue about it, argue about it. There was a moment in there where extreme things were being said by a cast member about ICE and suddenly 25 people got to their feet and marched out.
The whole point of the play was to try and give both extreme sides a voice and let it happen on stage in the way it happened in 1980. And to leave the audience questioning their own beliefs and either reaffirming or changing them.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about for the use of English and bilingualism?
Nick Griffin:
It’s key to have a native tongue. If you want to speak Hindi, speak Hindi. That is a wonderful thing if we all have this culture in common at the center, and that is the American ideal. This goes all the way back to the Book of Genesis. The Tower of Babel story is a people who are trying to create one language and be one people to have one aim. There is that moment when God says, “no, you’re going to be split into hundreds of languages and your job is to create a covenant despite those differences. Can you get a more American question than the one that is asked in Genesis? And the answer is we are a work in progress.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Nick for joining us. If you missed the previous podcast, the topic was Mr. Warsh Goes to Washington.
President Trump recently nominated Kevin Warsh to be the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. In October 2022, Kevin spoke on What Happens Next along with my old boss Myron Scholes who was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
In this episode I included excerpts from that previous meeting as well as an additional interview with John Cochrane who is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, and he discussed the challenges that Kevin will face in his new job.
John explained Kevin’s plans to reduce the Fed’s investment in US Treasury bonds as well as what the Fed’s role should be in regulating banks. We also discussed limiting the Fed’s independence.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Mr. Warsh Goes To Washington, here.
