Spanish language at a critical juncture in the US

Distribución de los hispanohablantes en los EE. UU. en el año 2000. El azul más intenso indica una mayor proporción.

That's the way I read this latest poll by Ipsos. In the US regarding immigration the general rule has been that immigrants from another country, if in large numbers (think German and Polish for example), will cause a bit of a backlash during the first generation out of a fear that they won't learn English and will set up their own communities within the country where they don't have to use anything but their own tongue, but that after a generation or so they will settle in and start using more and more English and eventually forget their own tongue.

Spanish is a different matter however, given 1) the much larger population base and 2) the fact that the nearest Spanish-language nation is just across the border as opposed to across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, if a language doesn't have that much influence on its own it's still likely to fade away pretty quickly within immigrant communities as it quickly becomes more of a hindrance than anything in one's daily life.

According to the poll, Hispanics in the US use English and Spanish at nearly the same rate at hone:

Regardless of their language preference at home, whether it is English (43%) or Spanish (52%) ...

The poll seems surprised that older Hispanics are more likely to prefer using English but I'm not:

Hispanics, aged 18-34, are actually less likely (54%) than older Hispanics, aged 55+, to prefer English language television (61%).

This number is very interesting:

College educated Hispanics overwhelmingly prefer English language television (80%).

Regarding online habits, English is given a slight preference:

English is the leading language of preference for the Internet among all Hispanic age groups as over half of all Hispanics (55%) said that their language preference for the Internet is English. Yet, nearly forty-percent (39%) of Hispanics age 18-34 prefer Spanish language internet sites, showing that a good proportion of younger Hispanics are closely tied to Spanish while online.

This is probably one of the reasons why the Prime Minister of Spain is so eager to promote usage of Spanish on the Internet, because the language seems to be at a point where it's just about as useful as English online but not quite (on Wikipedia it's just one step below German and French in terms of content for example), and the addition of another 60 million users and the content they create over the next 5 years certainly can't hurt.