Donald Trump is about to recognize reality by making English the official language | Opinion
The Wall Street Journal reports that Donald Trump is about to sign an executive order making English the official language of the United States.
Duh.
English has always been the official language of the United States, at least in an unofficial sense.
The constitutions of the 13 original colonies? Written in English. The debate on whether to rebel against the English? Conducted in English. The Emancipation Proclamation? English. The debate over Gilded Age monopolies and whether to enter World War I? English. The arguments for and against Prohibition and giving women the right to vote? English
George Washington’s letters? Abe Lincoln’s debates with Stephen Douglas? Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Fireside chats? Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech? The first words uttered from the surface of the moon? When Ronald Reagan told Mikhail Gorbechev to “Tear down this wall.” All English.
But if you’re thinking this is a piece about Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, you’re wrong. If you care about immigrants, you want them to learn English. Immigrants don’t disagree with that.
Census officials used their massive database to look at the consequences of speaking English poorly and they found that immigrants who speak English very well are more likely to have a job that is more likely to be full time with benefits and pay better than those who speak English poorly.
And that was true for everybody. It doesn’t matter if you are man or woman, black or white, which country you’re from, if you have a college degree or dropped out of high school. Everybody does better when they learn English.
Some are going to object to the fact that Trump’s order drops a Clinton-era mandate that agencies and other recipients of federal funding are required to provide language assistance to non-English speakers.
First, it doesn’t prevent people from providing that assistance. And second, are you really helping people if you make it easier for them not to learn English? I don’t think so.
In the immigrant communities I am familiar with that is something the community can and do provide for themselves with the best English speakers helping the least proficient. There’s nothing wrong with asking immigrant communities to do that, more to stand on their own two feet after the billions Joe Biden lavished on them while allowing millions of undocumented immigrants to flood over our border.
I come from an immigrant family on both sides. We came after World War I and each generation has worked its way up the ladder of America’s middle class. The key for all of us was English proficiency. One of my grandmas, born in a Brooklyn tenement poverty, became a teacher’s aide in the New York Schools teaching kids in English even though she didn’t grow up speaking it. The other, born on a Missouri farm, became a nurse taking all of her classes in English despite being one generation removed from the motherland.
In recent years, as immigration to the United States has become ever more diverse, the effort to provide services and signage and government documents in enough languages to serve the people who come here following in my grandparents’ footsteps, looking for a better life has sort of become a joke.
In Los Angeles, the immigrants speak 224 languages. Here in the Midwest, refugees from Somalia and Sudan and Syria don’t even always speak the same language among themselves. If we do provide language services, for the most part, they go to the lucky ones who speak the right languages, leaving others out.
The debate over official English has flared on and off for decades, with each ideological side digging in for the fight. It has always been a sideshow because the reality is that America is an English-speaking nation whatever some law or executive order says. Thirty states already designate English as the official language. Indeed, the immigrants I know already prioritize learning English for both themselves and their children.
All Donald Trump has done is recognize reality. I wish he’d do that more.
This story was originally published February 28, 2025 at 12:17 PM.
