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ICE shooting comes after bombshell probe finds new recruits 'can barely read or write'
(www.rawstory.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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Por que? How are you going to communicate with officials if you do not speak English? You pretend that there is no reason for this definition.
Translators. Real statistics, not ones from far right think tanks, put illiteracy around 2% in the US.
If you're wondering why, go read the 14th amendment to the United States constitution and think about how it might apply to access to one's government officials.
I feel ya, but the practical reality is that almost all news, all social media, all politics, all technical information, all medical information, and all official documents are presented primarily or only in English.
Yes America doesn't have an official language, but if you had to pick between living here with fluent Spanish and no English, vs. fluent English but no Spanish, which do you think is gonna give you an easier time by far?
I don't find 21% illiteracy hard to believe. I went to a particularly good high school, and even there about 1/5 kids could only read books aloud in a painfully halting, word-by-word manner. And they could either read aloud or understand what they read, not both. And again this was a top-rated high school in the area by far. And just look at the social media trend of flashing words one by one as captions - people pretend it's for those with sound down or hearing difficulties, but the truth is it makes the content vastly more digestible for people who can't pay attention to words but get overwhelmed by the sight of full sentences. So even the people who can read are fantastically bad at it.
you miss my point. it's not 21% illiteracy. it's 21% english illiteracy. the last time i read the statistics on it (iirc it was the 2022 numbers but i don't really care to find them again) 21% were illiterate in english. 2% were not literate in any language. somewhere between 12% and 18% had something between a 6th and 9th grade literacy level in some written language. I'm not arguing whether it is easier to be literate and/or fluent in the lingua franca. i'm just saying you are taking a shortsighted view if you only look at the english language.
No disrespect, but I believe you have missed my point - I understood that you're pointing out that only looking at English literacy is shortsighted. I'm suggesting that English literacy is by far the only significant metric when it comes to someone's ability to function, especially with poltical wisdom, in the United States. It doesn't really matter if half the population is fluent in Vietnamese when all the political debates are in English. This forces them to rely on third-party (questionable) commentary and interpretation for all their news and understanding of the political environment.
If we were talking about a country like Switzerland, where signage, documents, and official material is easily accessible in multiple languages, and where political discussion widely occurs im multiple languages, then I would agree that measuring only German literacy is misleading and not meaningful. But the United States is not that type of country, so it is specifically English literacy that matters, especially when we're talking about being politically informed.
TLDR; if I speak fluent Latin, but no other languages, and I live in Kentucky, it is pretty fair to describe me as illiterate. The literacy I do possess functionally does not exist.