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Be what it may, the certain thing is that a greater presence of Hispanics in politics has supposed a jump, unimaginable a few years ago, of the Spanish language to the political area, whether in the Spanish reply of the New Mexican Governor Richardson to President Bush’s speech to the State of the Union January 21, 2004, or with the bilingual debates in the primaries of national character as it happened on September 2003, or with the electoral publicity the Republican party printed in Vista , the Spanish magazine with the greatest diffusion in the nation. There is no doubt that this leap toward the first plane of a language that has always worked as an opaque rumor has contributed to improving the linguistic self-esteem of Hispanics and to reinforce their feeling of loyalty to the maternal language (Bred, 2004).

On the other hand, in spite of their agricultural occupations, especially in the enclave of the Mexican-Americans of the southwest, Hispanics reside preferably in cities with great vitality, like global cities where there is a large percentage of world-wide commerce, especially that oriented to Latin America. Thus, 6 million Hispanics reside in the metropolitan area of Los Angeles, representing 34% of that metropolitan population; 3 million in the area of New York, representing 15%; 1.5 million in the Miami and Lauderdale area, representing 34%; 1 million in San Francisco Bay, including Silicone Valley, representing 16%; another million in the Chicago area, representing 11%; and another million in Houston, representing 21% of its urban population. In this urban globalized world, the presence of Spanish in the work market is more and more essential as time goes by. Global cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, recognized as the commercial capital of Latin America, cities with a great control of the financial and commercial traffic, obligatorily require the presence of the Spanish language, which makes this language a “plus” of labor opportunities for Spanish-speakers that have managed to maintain their maternal language. This eliminates the old paradox saying Hispanic adults must spend long hours of their life trying to acquire a language they lost as a child because of a rigorous monolingual policy that imposed speaking only English. This added value to the Spanish language in the labor world is confirmed by the results of a survey of Center For Labor Research&Studies in April 2004, directed toward Cubans and Cuban-Americans of South Florida, where 70% of the interviewees and the majority of those born in the U.S. consider that speaking Spanish is helpful to find a job (Bred, 2004, p. 90). One more proof that the Spanish language, besides having a strong identity value, is a strong utilitarian component instrumental in the human and social capital of Hispanics.

There is a phenomenon between Hispanics of the U.S. that, without a doubt, will have a positive impact in the maintenance of Spanish of the second and third generations. I refer to the creation of authentic transnational communities through the flow of remittances, information, and contacts on behalf of the respective diasporas of Latin immigrants. As affirmed by Alexander Portes (2004, p. 10), nowadays, the remittances of the Latin immigrants fully exceed the foreign aid received by the country, competes in size with the extreme total of direct foreign investments, and some exceed the total income obtained from exports. In countries like Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the immigrants’ remittances are among the three main sources of currency, becoming thus fundamentally integral to the national economy. But the volume of the remittances is not only enormous, but regular and stable throughout time, which allows international banks to use the future remittances as a collateral guarantee at the time of granting loans to banks of the origin countries. That is how the modest wage-earning work of immigrants hits the world-wide economy through the activation of the five T’s of economic integration: tourism, telecommunications, transport (aerial), transference of remittances, and trade commerce denominated nostalgic. A pursuit of these five axes, as Manuel Orozco (2004) did, would discover the complexity that the impact of these remittances have in the economies of the origin countries.

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Source:  OpenStax, Immigration in the united states and spain: considerations for educational leaders. OpenStax CNX. Jul 26, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11174/1.28
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