Speaking English has become rarer than I thought. When I recently put my 1985 Plymouth Horizon up for sale in the classifieds of the Washington Post and the Washington Times, I wondered how many people would respond to my ad. Little did I know how many calls I’d actually get.

Problem was, I couldn’t understand any of the callers, because they were all foreigners. Well, that’s an exaggeration. I could understand most of what they said, but you get the picture. Not one American, white or black, came to look at the car. Instead, I got a variety of Hispanics, an Afghan, and an Iranian, this last one being the guy who plunked down 500 bucks for it and told me the car was burning oil. Hooray! The guy understood a combustion engine.

At any rate, when the 1990 Census came out, it wasn’t hard to reckon why selling a car in Arlington, Virginia, was akin to selling rugs in a Turkish bazaar. About 15 percent of Arlington County’s residents can’t speak English well, as the Washington Post put it, compared with 2.8 percent ten years ago. A hefty 25 percent of Arlington’s residents speak a language other than English at home, with the total for the Northern Virginia suburbs at 17.3 percent.

The Maryland suburbs are no better. In the metro area that includes Prince Georges and Montgomery Counties, among others, 15.5 percent of the residents don’t speak English at home. In the District itself, the figure is 12.5 percent. That’s a total, reported the Post, of some 568,000 people who aren’t speaking English at home.

In and of themselves these figures might not seem alarming, until you compare them to the figures ten years ago. In 1980, the percentage of Arlingtonian aliens speaking a foreign language at home was 16 percent. Montgomery County’s figure increased from 13.4 percent in 1980 to 21.2 percent. The Census not only tells us Third Worlders like to cluster in and around urban areas such as Washington and New York, but also that many more immigrants are swamping our shores. In Montgomery County, for instance, enrollment in English classes has grown from 10,000 in 1986 to 16,000 now.

But there’s more to this than the major irritant of having to speak Vietnamese or Korean to buy cigarettes or gum at the 7-Eleven. The popular myth promulgated by open-border advocates like Ben Wattenberg is that all these immigrants are a blessing. They make lots of money. They improve the economy. They take jobs we Americans think we’re too good for.

Where Wattenberg & Co. live is anybody’s guess, but it ain’t in Arlington. Many of the immigrants I see prowling around the streets look and act like bums and, as soon as they get here, go straight onto the welfare rolls. Mario Escobar arrived here from Guatemala seven years ago, the Post reported. When he lost his construction job, his pals, other Guatemalans who no doubt knew how to work the system, told him he could get unemployment compensation. He shops at stores owned by Hispanics. Neither he nor his wife speaks English, although when he buys a shirt he knows to look for an “M,” meaning medium. County social workers, subsidized by taxpayers, occasionally provide translation services for Mario. And finally, this—and let’s quote directly from the newspaper: “Although they realize that learning English would improve their prospects, they see little hope for improving their lot. Escobar has a fifthgrade education and is barely literate in native Spanish.”

Then there’s Jose Pena, who came from Bolivia in 1982: “He is proud that he passed his driver’s license in English, he said, but his wife still needs his help with the language.” Whether Mario and Jose are even citizens the paper didn’t say, but they are, the open-borders crowd would argue, “American.” It might be impolitic to ask, but don’t most “Americans” speak English at home?

Now back to life in Arlington County, which the Vietnamese and Hispanics have turned into a cross between Saigon and Mexico City. On Fridays, I frequently take a cab to work in the city, because those of us who still drink distilled spirits (as opposed to wine coolers) are the only targets of law enforcement the police can stop without probable cause, force to confess, and make the charges stick (unless your name happens to be Rodney King). Not one taxi driver has been an American. Ethiopians, Burundians, Burkina Fasoans, yes. No teeth. No English. No Americanos. Not that it should be surprising.

As the Associated Press reported a few months ago, “once, the stereotypical New York cabbie was a cigar-chomping, wisecracking hack who was born and raised in the Bronx. Not any more. Today, he may be a Pakistani-born, turbanclad man who’s more comfortable speaking Urdu.” As New York goes, so goes Arlington. Where’s Travis Bickle when you need him?