@chercheur I have mixed feelings, too. Our foreign language education in the US is so bad and the teacher cert process so ridiculous that I really feel like the resources could be spent better elsewhere. At the college level, without those required gut elementary courses you can’t sustain a foreign language department of any size, though, so I feel differently about higher education than HS. If you want the literature, you have to have required courses being paid for. It’s hard. You can travel 3000 miles in the US and only hear English. There is zero incentive to learn foreign languages with learning Spanish being marginally more helpful to people.
I’m flabbergasted that anyone would suggest that people without English proficiency working low-wage jobs are low-skilled. Often they are very highly educated, just not in the US - doctors, lawyers, university students, etc.