'I pledge allegiance to ...' los Estados Unidos: have you noticed the English and Spanish trend in America?

It's in everything from ATMs to phone calls seeking help from the Federal bureaucracy to assembly brochures and increasingly in secondary public schools.

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Now before you label me some kind of language bigot or worse, let me say right off the bat, I think it's great to study other languages besides English. I've been studying several myself for nearly 50 years and one of them is Spanish. So, por favour. My concern is not with learning, it's with the unity of the American people and our future in global manufacturing completion. Let me explain in more detail.

There are some 11 million illegal immigrants in America, the over-whelming majority from Latin America. They come here, often risking jail or even death, because their own countries, mostly Mexico, offer them no acceptable economic opportunity. They are desperate enough, like millions of other Third World people, to try anything to sneak into this nation and Western Europe. I sympathize with them and their terrible plight. Yet, is it in our best long-term interests and theirs to leave our borders so porous and at the same time introduce Spanish as a second official language of America? I think not.

This country's great nobility is to be open to all peoples who seek freedom and opportunity and want to work with us on their own American dreams. It has been so since its founding. Every language group in the world came here, usually without sneaking in, and never did any of them seriously try to force the rest of the nation into learning, say Serbo-Croatian. Well, if you know your Revolutionary History, the German population tried it in the 1780s. It was quickly verboten. English has always been one of the major components of unity in America. It facilitates commerce, government, education, and, yes, manufacturing success.

Here are the questions that are bothering me then. What happens to the southwest in particular when Spanish-speakers there are in the majority (in a few years some say)? Does that part of the country revert to Mexico? Does south Florida become part of Cuba when Castro ascends into socialist heaven?

Manufacturing in particular needs more and more people who are well versed and comfortable in reading and running complex machines and systems. Employees of all kinds in today's shop world have to have communications skills at a higher level than ever before. Everybody speaking and reading English seems to me to be a terrific advantage for any industrial outfit in the United States. It's a terrific advantage for machine tool users in Mexico that they speak and read Spanish fluently as well.

On another level, it's a terrific advantage for any company's management and employees--anywhere in the world--to understand and speak English since it has become the lingua franca of international business. So, why are we diluting our own international and national advantages with this creeping official bilingualism? Don't we know about Canada? Belgium?

Or, am I overreacting to all of this? Is a bilingual America a sensible and workable future for all of us and for manufacturing? Are English and Spanish unavoidable and OK?

Recently, a survey noted that, if given the chance, some 42% of the people of Mexico would come to the Estados Unidos. That's flattering in a way. It's very sad as well. But, is it something we should address with more guards along the Rio Bravo (that's what it's called in Mexico, not the Rio Grande) and English-only laws?

So what do you think? What is the appropriate and best policy for America and American industry on this issue? I am very interested in what you might have to say--in English please, Por Favour. My Spanish is still pretty bad. Muchos Gracias.

George Weimer, Contributing Editor