This seems so painfully clear to me. If you want to move to America, you have to become and American. Americans speak english. If you don’t, you aren’t.

Somehow, this opinion has been labeled ‘racist’. What is racist about wanting to understand and be understood by other Americans? Freedom of speech becomes worth less if half of your brethren can’t understand what you are saying.

If English-language competence isn’t one of those proficiencies, then excuse me please; I woke up in the wrong country.

In this Curmudgeon’s opinion, the inability to express oneself in spoken or written English, at least well enough to describe to a Chevrolet dealer the exact steering wheel, tires, and gas-filled shocks one wants on one’s low-rider Caprice, should be grounds for expulsion from this country. Or, to put it as Ted Nugent once did:

“If you want to sell me a Big Mac, you’d better do it in English.”

There’s a pattern: Immigrants come and take the low paying jobs Americans don’t want, break their backs and struggle while they raise a generation that gets educated and moves ahead, then more immigrants from other countries come and replace them.

The wild card here is the retired and retiring Baby Boomers vs the continuously shrinking American family.

I’ll concur that we need to reform the system, as we’re definitely being overrun, as Sean pointed out, but this isn’t an altogether easy problem to solve, as we’ve become somehow stuck between a rock and a hard place: With American families having less children than will be needed to support the next couple of generations of retirees, how else will we have enough people working and paying taxes unless we import them? The phenomenon James Taranto calls the “Roe” Effect is about to overtake us, big time.

It shouldn’t be this way, we once got along just fine when we had real immigration quotas that more or less corresponded with the needs of the marketplace, but somewhere in the interval between the influx of refugees from southeast Asia and the early 1990s, a floodgate seems to have opened, immigrants pouring in. The problem is that we’ve successfully absorbed them, for the most part, due to the “demand” in certain markets for cheap labor, as we always have before.

“For English, press 1” always makes me angry.