The immigration question is in the air, and with it questions of language and identity that always follow.

In his book “Less Than Words Can Say” (incredibly available for free here), Richard Mitchell identifies language as the easiest way to control a the underclass. “Of course!”, says the earnest liberal. “Making immigrants learn English is nothing more than cultural imperialism, we’ll not stand for that!”

Not so, language is only a dangerous weapon in the hands of those in power if the people under their control don’t understand it. The Russians aristocracy controlled the serfs by speaking French among themselves, the last thing they wanted was the serfs to go out and learn French. The French aristocracy had courtly French, Imperial China had 文言文, and (Mitchell’s best example) American bureaucrats have poor English. When the apartheid government in South Africa forced black South Africans to be educated in Afrikaans it was a cruel and racist policy, not simply because it lead to the extinction of tribal languages, but rather more so because the language of business and government was English and they were cut out from it.

On the face of it an officially polyglot America seems compassionate, in line with our history as a nation of immigrants, but it is anything but. By disincentivizing the learning of English would be doing nothing less than consigning millions of Americans to linguistic ghettos, with persisitent poverty and frustration to go along with it.