English as a Common Language Is a Gift to Newcomers, Not a Barrier

Imagine a country where every citizen can speak to every other citizen. Where a plumber in Tucson and a judge in Boston and a soldier from Montana can read the same contract, vote on the same ballot and argue in the same room. Now imagine someone telling you that this arrangement is an act of oppression.

That is where the argument over English has landed, and I think it deserves better. Expecting newcomers to learn the common language is not a barrier erected against them. It is the single most useful thing a country can hand a person who has come to build a life in it. Let me make that argument carefully, with definitions, a steelman and the history, and then give the objection its due.

What I am claiming, and what I am not

Precision first, because this subject gets smeared in both directions.

A common language means a language that serves as the shared medium of public life: of government business, courts, schools, commerce and civic debate. It does not mean the only language anyone may speak. A family may speak Spanish, Korean or Polish at home. A congregation may worship in Latin, Hebrew or Vietnamese. A neighborhood may have a newspaper in Chinese. A common language is a floor, not a ceiling.

An English requirement means a legal or practical expectation that a person who wants to join the political community fully, as a naturalized citizen, a voter or a public official, can function in English.

Here is the claim in three premises:

1. A self-governing people must be able to talk to one another, because self-government is government by discussion and persuasion.
2. In the United States that common language is English, by history and by overwhelming practice.
3. Expecting English therefore serves newcomers, because it opens the labor market, the courts, the schools and the ballot box to them, and a policy that makes English optional ends up trapping people in a smaller world.

Notice what I am not claiming. I am not claiming that other languages are inferior, that people who speak them are lesser, or that anyone should be punished for speaking their mother tongue. I am arguing about public life, not private life.

The Founding view, honestly stated

Let me start where I always like to start, with the Founders, and let me be careful not to overstate what they said.

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay described Americans as "one united people," a people "descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government." That sentence is often quoted as a Founding endorsement of a common language, and it does say that Jay thought a shared language was a strength of the Union.

But I want to be honest about the limits. Jay's description was an idealization. Colonial America was already home to speakers of German, Dutch, French, Swedish and other languages. The Constitution does not name an official language. In 1780 John Adams proposed that Congress create an academy to refine and regulate the English language, and Congress did not adopt it. The Founders valued a shared language, and they chose not to write one into law.

That tells us what kind of argument this is. It is not a constitutional command. It is a prudential judgment about what makes a free people work, made by statute and by custom. The Founders trusted the people and the market to settle the matter, and for most of our history they did. I am making the case that this trust has been well placed, and that the law should remain on the side of the common language, not that the Constitution compels it.

The steelman: "Why make people learn it at all?"

Here is the best case against an English expectation, stated the way its defenders would put it.

Congress has never made English the official language by statute, and the Constitution names none. Millions of Americans speak other languages at home, and many of them are citizens, taxpayers, soldiers and parents. People learn English at their own pace, and the best way to help them is with services in their own language while they do. A requirement or an expectation is a penalty on people who are already struggling. And history shows that English-only enthusiasm often has an ugly side.

The last sentence is true, and I will return to it. For now, let me answer the rest in numbered points.

One: English is the key to wages, to courts and to the ballot

The first answer is practical, and it is the one that matters most to the immigrant himself.

A person who cannot function in English is limited to a narrow set of jobs, usually those where employers or coworkers share his language. His wages are lower, his choice of employer is smaller and his ability to be promoted is bounded. He cannot read a lease or a loan contract without help. He cannot follow a teacher conference or a doctor's instructions without an intermediary. He is dependent on others to explain the society he lives in, and anyone who has been dependent on an interpreter knows that is not a comfortable position.

The research on immigrant earnings has long found that English proficiency is associated with higher wages, and I do not need a figure to make the point: ask any employer. The hardest barrier to moving up in an American workplace is not a lack of talent. It is a lack of a common tongue with the people who make the decisions.

The same applies to citizenship. A citizen is a participant in self-government. He reads a ballot, serves on a jury, follows a debate and petitions his representatives. A citizen who cannot do those things in the language of the republic is a citizen with a diminished share in it. Making English a goal is a way of asking everyone to take a full share.

Two: the law has said so since 1906

Now the legal history, which is longer than most people think.

The Naturalization Act of 1906 barred from naturalization anyone who could not speak English, with an exception for those physically unable to meet the requirement. The requirement has been in the law, in one form or another, ever since. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act as it stands, an applicant for naturalization must demonstrate an ability to read, write and speak ordinary English, and must pass a test of knowledge of American history and government. There are exceptions, including for older applicants who have been permanent residents for many years and for applicants with certain disabilities.

Think about what this means. For more than a century, the country has said that the final step into full citizenship requires the language of the republic. Over that time, millions of immigrants have met the requirement, and many of them have described it as the moment they became Americans. A law that has worked for over a hundred years, with broad support among the immigrants who have passed through it, is not an exotic imposition.

You can see what the test asks in Twelve Questions From the Citizenship Civics Test and the Answers Behind Them, and I would also point out that there is a second reading of the requirement. If we ask new citizens to pass a civics test in English, we should ask the rest of us to know the same material, which is the argument of If New Citizens Must Pass the Civics Test, Graduates Should Pass It Too.

Three: Meyer v. Nebraska draws the line

Now to the case that every defender of an English expectation must reckon with, because it marks the limit of what government can do.

In 1919 Nebraska passed a law forbidding the teaching of any subject in a language other than English in any school, and forbidding the teaching of foreign languages to children who had not finished the eighth grade. It was a wartime measure, passed in the shadow of World War I and suspicion of German-speaking communities. A teacher named Robert Meyer, who taught reading in German at a parochial school, was convicted for teaching a ten-year-old to read in that language.

In Meyer v. Nebraska, decided in 1923, the Supreme Court struck the law down. The Court held that the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause includes the right to teach and to acquire useful knowledge, and the right of parents to direct the education of their children. The Court acknowledged that a legislature's desire to foster a homogeneous people with American ideals was easy to appreciate, but held that the means chosen went too far. In a line worth remembering, the opinion said: "The protection of the Constitution extends to all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue."

I want you to take two things from this case, because they pull in the same direction.

First, the Constitution protects the freedom to speak, teach and learn other languages. The government may not ban them. Any serious argument for a common language has to live inside that rule. Second, the Court did not say that the state has no interest in a common language. It said that the state's legitimate goal of civic unity could not be pursued by prohibiting private teaching. A requirement that people learn English to take part in public life, to naturalize, to attend public school instruction and to do government business, is a different kind of thing from a ban on speaking anything else.

Meyer is, in short, the guardrail. My argument sits inside it. I support a common language because it helps people, and I oppose coercion of private speech because it violates liberty. These are not in tension.

Four: official English and the states

Many states have adopted an official-English law, a majority of them by now, by statute or by constitutional provision. These laws vary a great deal. Some are purely symbolic, declaring English the official language and doing little else. Others require that official government business, such as public meetings and published documents, be conducted in English, with exceptions for public safety, health and the rights of defendants and litigants.

Here is how I think they should be judged, by two questions.

1. Does the law protect the common language without punishing people for speaking others? A law that sets English as the language of official acts, while preserving emergency services, courts, interpreters and private speech, passes. A law that punishes ordinary speech or denies someone a right because of their language does not, and Meyer and the equal-protection cases would likely forbid it.
2. Does it save money or improve outcomes? A policy that reduces the costs of translating every document into dozens of languages, and encourages people to learn English, can be defended on practical grounds. A policy whose chief effect is to humiliate does not deserve to be called a policy at all.

State laws are the right place for these experiments, in keeping with federalism. A state legislature can see what works in its own communities and adjust. That is one reason I prefer them to a single national rule.

Five: Executive Order 13166 and the cost of translating everything

The federal government has a particular history here, and it is worth knowing.

In August 2000, President Clinton signed Executive Order 13166, "Improving Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency." It directed federal agencies to develop plans to make their services accessible to people with limited English, and it required recipients of federal funds, such as hospitals and state agencies, to take reasonable steps to do the same. The legal basis was Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination on the basis of national origin in programs receiving federal money, and the Supreme Court's 1974 decision in Lau v. Nichols, which held that a school district's failure to give non-English-speaking students any meaningful help violated Title VI.

The order's goal, that people not be shut out of essential services such as emergency medical care and courts because of a language gap, is a good one. No decent person wants a family unable to call for help. The question is about breadth and cost. Translating and interpreting every service into every language, indefinitely, costs real money, and it can reduce the incentive to learn English by making English unnecessary. Critics argued that the order effectively created a federal translation mandate by executive action, without a vote in Congress. In 2001 the Supreme Court held in Alexander v. Sandoval that private parties cannot sue to enforce Title VI's disparate-impact regulations, which reduced the order's teeth. In March 2025 Executive Order 14224 revoked it and designated English the official language of the United States by executive order, though the Title VI statute and the court decisions remain.

My view is this. Emergency services, courts and genuine safety needs should always have interpretation. Beyond that, policy should lean toward helping people learn English and not toward permanent translation, because the first helps the immigrant rise, and the second keeps him in a smaller room.

The strongest objection: "This is exclusionary"

Now the objection I promised to answer, and I will answer it at full strength.

Language policy has a history of being used against particular groups. Nebraska's law was aimed at German speakers. Other laws were used against Spanish speakers and against Native children, who were punished in boarding schools for speaking their languages. When someone says "English only" it often means something about who belongs. Why should we trust that this time it is different?

My answer comes in three parts.

First, concede the history. It is real. The punishment of children for speaking their own languages was wrong, and so was the wartime campaign against German in the schools. Those episodes were failures of liberty, and the Court said so in Meyer. Any English policy that revives them is a bad policy and should be opposed on conservative grounds, because conservatives defend the freedom of families and churches to pass on their own tongue and traditions.

Second, distinguish an expectation from a prohibition. What I am defending is a public language, not a private ban. An immigrant family that speaks Vietnamese at home and its children who learn English at school are exactly the pattern of American assimilation. The pattern, repeated generation after generation, is that the children are bilingual and their children speak English, and the old language survives, if at all, as a heritage. The law has no business interfering with that, and a common-language policy does not.

Third, ask who benefits. The people who are most hurt by a society that does not expect English are the immigrants themselves. A child in a school that never gets around to teaching English well, or a worker in a job that never requires it, is a person whose life has been made smaller by a policy that called itself kindness. The way to include people is to give them the tools of full membership. That is what an English expectation does when it is done right: it extends an invitation to the whole conversation. It is the opposite of exclusion.

I would add a point about unity. Jay's phrase about speaking the same language was not about excluding anyone. It was about what makes it possible for a diverse people to remain one. A country of three hundred million people from every background on earth needs something in common, and a language is the most basic thing. Take away the common language and you do not get a mosaic. You get parallel societies that never meet. See also The Melting Pot Was a Good Idea and the Salad Bowl Is a Worse One and Teddy Roosevelt's argument in Teddy Roosevelt's 1915 Warning Against Hyphenated Americanism, Read Closely.

What follows in practice

Turn the argument into policy and you get a short list.

• Keep the naturalization requirement. English and civics together are a fair, long-standing price of full membership.
• Fund adult English classes. If we expect English, we owe people a way to learn it. Community colleges, libraries and church programs already do this work, and many have waiting lists.
• Teach English well in schools, with immersion and clear exit standards, so children are fluent early.
• Conduct official business in English, with interpreters for courts, health and safety, as Meyer and the equal-protection cases require.
• Protect private language. No government should ever penalize a family, a church or a business for using another tongue.

That is a program that a conservative can defend on grounds of liberty, prudence and generosity at once.

The case in brief

1. A self-governing people must be able to talk to one another, and in the United States the common language is English, which Federalist No. 2 treated as one of the bonds of the Union.
2. Expecting English helps immigrants, because it opens jobs, courts, schools and the ballot to them, and the naturalization requirement has been in federal law since 1906.
3. Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) is the guardrail: the Constitution protects the right to speak, teach and learn other languages, so a common-language policy must be about public life and never about banning private speech.
4. State official-English laws and the federal translation order of 2000 should be judged by whether they protect the common language, preserve emergency and courtroom access and help people learn English.
5. The charge of exclusion fails when the policy is an invitation to the whole conversation, because the people most hurt by a society that never expects English are the newcomers themselves.

What you can do: find the adult English classes in your county, at the library, the community college or a church, and volunteer to tutor or help one family practice for the naturalization test, and read the English requirement in the Immigration and Nationality Act on Congress.gov.