The language of air traffic control and pilots, international trade, and international law is English. It is the current “lingua franca,” and it’s not likely to change. That’s already been established. Listen to a U.N. discussion — it’s done in English. So that problem has already been solved. All that’s left to do is get rid of people’s irrational attachment to something that arose in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia and which has since that time involved governments enforcing and establishing a uniform culture under its rule through government education.

You seem to think that the U.S. and Mexico would have a harder time working things out than the U.S. and India simply because the latter two share an “official” language. I find that to be absurd.

I have discovered, being married to a Hispanic woman for 13 years now, that there are in fact very few actual cultural differences between her extended family and my extended family. She thought, because I’m a white guy with a Ph.D., that I was going to “freak out” when I met her family. At the time, she had not met my family, who all lived in Kentucky (she and I met in Dallas, and her family lives in the Rio Grande Valley), so she didn’t know anything about them. My dad’s side of the family all grew up in rural western Kentucky, and so are what most people would consider to be “hillbillies.” It turns out that her family and my family all behave almost identically. Her family actually had a slight edge in all being bilingual.

It turns out that there are more similarities among poor Southern whites and poor Mexican-Americans than there are similarities among poor Southern whites and educated elites. Also, all elites, regardless of culture, are much more alike than not. I’ve had a foot in both poverty and elite cultures, and white and Hispanic cultures, and there’s more differences between the first two and the last two.

Elites love to pit people against each other to maintain their power. It’s a strategy that they’ve seen over the years to work, and that’s why they do it. The last thing they want is for people to get together, find out they have little real differences between each other, and get along.