I’m not going to say it was your intention, but it reads like “immigrants are lowering the literacy rate”. It’s something I’ve seen too often.

I'm having trouble seeing the mental gymnastics to get that reading when I'm saying that the immigrants are unfairly being called illiterate, when they ARE literate, just in a different language.

The emphasis is because “American” is not the same as “foreign-born resident”.

I'm discarding any of the statistics from that page I linked because I don't trust their methodology. I linked it not to support OPs argument about the rate if illiteracy, but to discredit it for being questionable based. The stats from my linked page match much of the stats from their linked page. My guess is that both draw from the same flawed measures and should not be trusted.