Foreigners Should Learn English
Xenophobia pays surprisingly well.
Your racist uncle was right. Not for the reasons he thinks—he’s still an idiot—but the core claim checks out. When he slurs “learn English” at the grocery store checkout, he’s accidentally stumbled onto one of the most important economic truths of our era, despite having no idea what he’s talking about.
Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud: English is where the money is. Practically all of it. The world’s wealth doesn’t just correlate with English—it concentrates there with unsympathetic absolutism. The ten largest economies on Earth control over 60% of global GDP, and they’re either English-speaking or their business elites are English-fluent because they’d be economically irrelevant otherwise. The United States alone commands $27.7 trillion in annual output. Add the UK, Canada, and Australia and you’ve got another $6 trillion. Germany? Japan? Singapore? Their executives negotiate in English because that’s where the deals happen.
This isn’t cultural preference. It’s not historical accident. It’s network effects operating at civilizational scale, and we all understand exactly how this works when we’re evaluating tech companies. Metcalfe’s Law: a network’s value grows proportional to the square of its users. Facebook isn’t worth hundreds of billions because it’s technically superior—it’s valuable because everyone’s already there, which makes everyone else join, which makes it more valuable, which makes more people join. It’s a self-reinforcing monopoly that becomes nearly impossible to breach once it achieves critical mass.
English hit that critical mass in global commerce at least fifty years ago, and the gap has only widened. Roughly 1.5 billion people speak English well enough to do international business. But the raw count understates the dominance. Between 67% and 80% of international business communication happens in English. Half of all website content is in English—more than the next ten languages combined. When you need to learn something technical, read cutting-edge research, or access global markets, the information exists in English or it likely doesn’t exist at all.
So here’s the question that breaks everyone’s brain: if joining this network would materially improve the lives of billions of people, and if the barrier to entry has collapsed to basically zero, why does suggesting they do it sound like something a xenophobe would say?
The Inversion
We’ve been trained to hear “foreigners should learn English” as advocacy for Americans at everyone else’s expense. But the economics run in the exact opposite direction, which is precisely why the people who would benefit most never hear this advice from anyone with a platform.
When that programmer in Ho Chi Minh City learns English, he doesn’t help Silicon Valley—he competes with it. Suddenly he can bid directly on international contracts, read technical documentation the day it’s published, collaborate in real-time with global teams, and bypass every local middleman who previously controlled his access to foreign clients. The American programmer who used to command $150/hour because he was one of the few people who could communicate with international clients? He’s now competing with someone equally talented charging $60/hour.
When that entrepreneur in Lagos becomes fluent, he doesn’t strengthen London’s economy—he threatens it. He can now pitch to Sand Hill Road directly, read the same business publications as his competitors, build relationships with foreign partners without translators, and access global supply chains without paying someone else to handle the interface. Every capability he gains is someone else’s rent-seeking opportunity eliminated.
If this were actually imperialism serving the interests of English-speaking nations, native speakers would be the primary beneficiaries. Instead, they’re the ones facing new competition from people who were previously locked out by language barriers. This is one of the vanishingly rare mechanisms by which someone born without advantages can compete directly with someone born into them—and the people who already have those advantages are fighting like hell to make sure nobody talks about it.
The Free Lunch
Here’s what makes this absolutely infuriating: English acquisition has never been cheaper or more accessible. Twenty years ago, learning English required expensive international schools, study abroad programs, or at minimum, imported textbooks and qualified teachers. Today it requires a smartphone.
Duolingo is free. YouTube hosts millions of hours of professional English instruction. AI tutors provide personalized practice at zero cost. Online communities connect learners with native speakers instantly. The barriers that once made English education an elite luxury have collapsed to next to nothing.
This is the only major economic advantage in human history that requires no natural resources, no infrastructure, no capital, no political connections, and absolutely no permission from gatekeepers. Singapore needed a deepwater port. Norway needed oil. Switzerland needed centuries of institutional stability. English requires none of that. It’s pure return on human capital investment, and the investment costs nothing but time and effort.
For any government remotely serious about economic development, universal English education should be the easiest policy win imaginable. The ROI dwarfs infrastructure spending, industrial policy, or trade negotiations. The barriers to entry have never been lower. The benefits compound over lifetimes. It doesn’t require betting on specific industries that might become obsolete or building physical infrastructure that depreciates and deteriorates.
Yet walk into a public school in Manila, Jakarta, or Lagos and you’ll find minimal English instruction. Meanwhile, the elite private schools in those same cities? Fully English-immersive, because the children of the powerful need to be globally competitive. Everyone else can stay linguistically trapped in domestic markets, dependent on those same elites to mediate their access to the global economy.
This isn’t an oversight. It’s a competitive advantage.
The Globalist Con
But the real villains—the ones whose hypocrisy reveals the whole rotten game—are the globalists who claim to want exactly what English would enable, then fight tooth and nail to prevent anyone from saying so out loud.
These are the people who advocate for:
Borderless labor markets
International cooperation on climate, health, and finance
Multinational governance structures
Universal human rights transcending national boundaries
Breaking down barriers between peoples
And then they turn around and oppose the single most effective mechanism for achieving any of it: a shared, global language.
You want global labor markets? Workers need to speak the language those markets operate in. You want international cooperation? That requires eliminating communication barriers, not hiring armies of translators. You want ideas to flow across borders? They need to flow in a language everyone can access. You want democracy and transparency? Populations need to be able to read primary sources, not depend on elite intermediaries to tell them what documents say.
The EU spends over €1 billion annually on translation services. The UN burns hundreds of millions more. Multinational corporations waste uncounted billions on cross-language documentation. These aren’t investments in cooperation—they’re transaction costs that exist purely because we pretend linguistic fragmentation is somehow a feature rather than a bug. That €1 billion could fund scholarships, infrastructure, or research. Instead it pays for the privilege of disenfranchisement.
Meanwhile—and here’s where the mask slips completely—the people staffing these institutions already operate in a de facto English-only environment. Davos? Conducted in English. International finance? English. Academic publishing? Ninety percent English in STEM fields. Tech companies? English. Even the UN officials negotiating in six official languages do their actual work in English, then hire translators to maintain the fiction of multilateralism.
When you suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should make the coordination mechanism available to everyone instead of restricting it to elites, they call you a cultural imperialist. When you point out that linguistic barriers primarily benefit rent-seekers and gatekeepers, they invoke colonialism—as if the historical origins of English dominance somehow change whether learning it today benefits the learner.
The tell is in who benefits from the current arrangement. Not the workers locked in domestic markets earning a fraction of what they could in global ones. Not the entrepreneurs who can’t access international capital. Not the students who can’t read the latest research in their fields. The beneficiaries are the people who profit from mediating access—the consultants, the translators, the corporate bureaucrats, the local elites, and the international institutions whose entire business model depends on linguistic fragmentation creating the problems they then get paid to “solve.”
The Stakes
The Tower of Babel fragmented humanity’s language and scattered us across the earth. Whether you read that as theology or metaphor, the economic reality is that linguistic barriers function as coordination costs that make everyone poorer. The difference is that Babel’s curse was supposedly imposed from above. Ours is self-imposed.
We have free global communication infrastructure. We have unlimited educational resources. We have AI tutors available to anyone with a smartphone. The barriers that remain exist because certain people profit from maintaining them, and they’ve convinced everyone else that dismantling those barriers would somehow be oppression.
Meanwhile, the wealth concentrates in English all the same. The opportunities flow to English speakers. The knowledge accumulates in English. And billions of people remain locked out—not because they lack capability, but because the people who could help them access the network profit more from their exclusion.
So yes, foreigners should learn English. Not because English is superior, not because other languages don’t matter, not because anyone should abandon their native tongue. But because English is where the money is, access is free, and permission is not required. The network exists. You can join it or you can stay dependent on people who profit from your isolation.
Your racist uncle stumbled onto this truth accidentally while being wrong about everything else. The tragedy is that the people who claim to oppose everything he stands for are working overtime to ensure he stays accidentally correct, because admitting the economic reality would require acknowledging that some barriers aren’t imposed from outside—they’re maintained from within by people who benefit from them.
The math doesn’t care about your politics. English concentrates wealth. The barrier to entry has collapsed. And the only question is whether we want everyone to join the network, or will use “colonial history” as an excuse to keep them out.