On September 27, California’s governor signed Assembly Bill 2555, which its author says met no opposition. Nearly a million public school students are classified as English learners, and until now, passing the state English test was only the first hurdle. Teachers, parents, and each district’s own skills test also had to sign off. Between 2022 and 2024, an estimated 37,000 students scored at the top level and were still classified as English learners the next year. Under the new law, one state test will do.
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I read that with a sense of recognition. English is the door into American life, and a door bolted from the inside by paperwork protects nobody.
When I arrived here in 1982, my first feeling was relief. My mother tongue is Telugu, and in Andhra Pradesh, India, I learned English at school, a key to the world’s literature, science, and philosophy. Back home, I once drove to the Chennai airport in neighboring Tamil Nadu, and crossing the state line turned a simple trip into an ordeal, with officials treating travelers who spoke Telugu rather than Tamil with suspicion. In America, I have driven hundreds of thousands of miles across dozens of states, and nobody has ever asked what language I speak.
I had a head start, since Indian schooling gave me English before I boarded the plane. But the experience taught me that a common language is a nation’s invisible civic infrastructure. Like roads, it draws no attention until it fails.
India shows what failure looks like. As a January 1965 deadline for dropping English approached, riots spread across Madras State, and by most accounts about seventy people died. Parliament let English stay alongside Hindi indefinitely. It survived because in the south, it was nobody’s mother tongue, so no Tamil- or Telugu-speaker had to feel that another region had won.
Other countries teach the same lesson. Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Only Act of 1956 fed a resentment that ended in civil war, and Bangladesh emerged from a language movement that began in 1952. Indonesia chose a neutral trading language over the tongue of its largest group and has held thousands of islands together. A shared language lasts when people can reach it and are never made to feel small for lacking it.
America has mostly settled the question without a decree. The first federal English requirement came in 1906, for naturalization. English kept winning anyway. A 2009 Pew survey found that 98 percent of second-generation young Latinos and 97 percent of the third generation spoke English proficiently. Immigrants understand the stakes: In a 2012 survey, 87 percent of Hispanics said immigrants need English to succeed. English also opens the world’s science, since well over 80 percent of indexed papers are written in it.
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So English should be the common language of every citizen and every legal resident, and the government should make learning it free and easy. Right now, it is neither. A 2024 report counted at least 20,000 people waiting for English classes in Massachusetts. This month, a literacy provider in Green Bay, Wisconsin had 300 people on its waiting list.
Expectations should be honest, too. Where a job requires strong English, employers can fairly ask for it. Where it does not, an accent or a halting sentence should not cost anyone a job.
Politicians on both sides have made a stage of this. In March 2025, the president signed an order declaring English the official language. Declaring is the easy part, though: Budget proposals for 2026 and 2027 sought to eliminate federal adult education funding before Congress kept the 2026 money. On the other side, a promise of translated forms is a bridge to English and cannot stand in for it. Nobody should be flattered into staying outside the common language for a vote, and nobody should be kept outside it by a waiting list.
None of this argues against other languages. My own children studied Spanish and French, and a shared civic tongue and a personal collection of others go well together.
America’s seamlessness is a rare achievement, and it does not maintain itself. It rests on a common language that everyone is invited into, taught for free. The road I drove in 1982 had no language checkpoints. Those who arrive next deserve the same road, and the classroom that leads to it.
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Image: Thijs Paanakker via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.