Dear Editor,

Earlier this summer I read one of the best letters to the editor that I’ve read in at least two years, other than the one that Mark Mixon from Glenwood Springs wrote a couple of weeks ago. The letter was by Phil Desmond, and the subject was officials in Georgia having to take mandatory Spanish classes.

It is a crime for Americans to have to learn any other language unless they want to. This is an English-speaking country, after all. His idea is that immigrants, after spending one year in America, if they are not “effective in their English speaking,” should have their legal immigrant status withdrawn and be subject to deportation. It is absolutely insane that English-speaking citizens should have to learn a “foreign” language to accommodate new foreign immigrants.

Is no one proud of their country anymore? Obviously the immigrants don’t respect our country or they would learn our language to better adapt in our culture.

I wouldn’t move to another country and expect everyone there to learn my language. The burden would be on me to learn their language. After all it’s their country, and if I want to live there I would need to do some adapting .

We need to make it at least 100 times harder to get across any of our borders. How many of us work here in the valley in a business that sounds like a foreign country all day, and this is the employees! We are rapidly changing from a mainly upper middle class valley to a much lower class valley.

And as for teaching foreign kids English in our schools, let the parents and the kids learn English before they can even enter our schools.

And send those Spanish newspapers down to Mexico so they can read them.

Dave Weigand

Basalt