President Trump has stormed in with talk of Muslim travel bans, plans to build a wall along the Southern border, and ambitions to deport millions. And Los Angeles County has been ground zero for immigrant flows and immigration issues for decades. In the early 1980s, roughly a fourth of all immigrants coming into the United States came in through the county, prompting the anxiety and fears that in 1994 led to Proposition 187, a ballot measure that sought to strip the undocumented of any access to education or other public services.

While the pace of immigration has dramatically slowed—in fact, the share of the population that is foreign-born has been on the decline for the last several years in L.A. County—the earlier demographic tidal wave permanently changed the shores it hit. Today, roughly one-third of all county residents are foreign-born, nearly half of the workforce is immigrant, and just over 60 percent of the county’s children have at least one immigrant parent.

Any changes with immigration policy and immigration rhetoric at the national level are bound to have a local impact here. This is particularly true of the new president’s focus on “illegal immigrants” and his promise—one of the few to be put into effect—to unleash Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a wide swath of people without legal status in the country.

In the last few years of the Obama administration, emphasis was placed—not always successfully and not always fairly—on deporting those with criminal records. What Trump has done is to essentially throw away any priorities: Anyone in the country without proper papers is fair game.

The threat of this new deportation regime is worrisome for many communities in the United States. But Los Angeles is an especially juicy target for ICE: Of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, nearly one million are in L.A. County. And while some may still think of the undocumented as recently arrived single men whose removal is regrettable but impacts them alone, that is clearly not the case in Los Angeles.

Here, people with legal standing and those without are thoroughly intertwined both personally and economically. More than 60 percent of the county’s undocumented have been in the United States for longer than 10 years, and roughly one-fifth of the county’s children have at least one undocumented parent. Families of mixed legal status are now the norm. There are about 800,000 U.S. citizens and another 250,000 lawful permanent residents who live with an undocumented family member.

That’s a lot of our neighbors—and we’re not counting all the undocumented relatives who may live nearby but in other households. We’re also not counting intimate non-family relationships: all Angelenos who rely on the undocumented to mow their lawns, take care of their kids, or clean their houses. In present-day Los Angeles, every deportation is likely to disrupt a family, damage a business, and weaken a community—and so what happens to and for immigrants really matters for everyone.

Trump has left us living in a disquieting scenario, one that Cynthia Buiza, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, describes as being “between hope and fear.”

The hope lies in the way the state’s immigrant and social movements have, in Buiza’s words, “tried to create a firewall around Trump.” Pressure has been placed on the state legislature to pass a California Values Act (SB 54) that would spread “sanctuary city” policies of non-cooperation with ICE across the state. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a combination of county, city, and philanthropic dollars have been pooled to create a $10 million L.A. Justice Fund that will provide resources for the legal defense of undocumented individuals facing the threat of deportation.

Despite such efforts, there is understandably plenty of trepidation on the part of immigrants. Local law enforcement agencies note that reports of sexual assault and domestic violence from Latino communities have fallen dramatically—not because there is less crime, but because there is less reporting. Meanwhile, county health officials are noticing a trend in which activity in local clinics is on the decline—but activity in emergency rooms, often for illnesses that should have been treated earlier, is on the upswing.

The actual scale of the deportation threat in L.A. County has been somewhat muted by several factors, including the unwillingness of local police forces, particularly the LAPD, to cooperate with ICE, as well as several effective “know your rights” campaigns by immigrant-serving organizations. But the fear is palpable and justified: There have some well-publicized cases, including the detention of an immigrant activist and student at Cal State Los Angeles, and many of us are living with the constant worry that a relative, neighbor, or co-worker will be snatched away.

There are also well-placed concerns about what might happen with DACA, the Obama-era executive action that granted temporary status and work permits to the so-called Dreamers—undocumented youth who came to the United States at an early age and basically grew up as Americans. Roughly nine percent of all those eligible for the program nationwide were county residents, and it is likely that Angelenos constituted an even larger share of those who applied, given the maturity and depth of the immigrant-serving infrastructure here in Southern California.

So far, the Trump administration has not stopped the popular program. But as Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, puts it, “DACA seems to be hanging by a thread.” If the president finds his policies stalled by Congress and his political standing threated by a special prosecutor, it may be tempting to shore up the support of his base with polarizing actions that do not require legislative approval.

Gutting DACA would check both those boxes: It can be done by presidential fiat, and it targets a population of “illegals” despised by a base of voters who seem unaware that no DACA recipient is actually going after their jobs in, say, coal mining. Moreover, to gut DACA would be to go after some of the most vibrant immigrant youth organizers in the anti-Trump resistance: dreamers who were instrumental in securing DACA, and have benefited from the program.

So how will L.A. respond if Trump further targets immigrants?

In the immediate future, it will be all about defense. Fortunately, major political figures like L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti have spoken strongly against the presidents’ immigration policies while Los Angeles County has moved forward with a new Office of Immigrant Affairs that will work with immigrant families to protect their rights and further their futures. The landscape is not without landmines: In tiny Cudahy, for example, pro-Trump activists from out of town are seeking to strip the fiscal base of the city (via a proposed ballot measure to end a utility tax upon which local government relies) as punishment for its status as a “sanctuary city.” But the general direction is positive.

One important effort that could help more: L.A. institutions should assist those legal immigrants who can become naturalized citizens to do so. Citizens are likely in a better position to defend their relatives—and to punish those opportunistic politicians who seek to divide. In L.A. County, nearly 800,000 adults could make that passage to citizenship—and to voting—and many organizations are stepping up to this task. An innovative program in the city libraries provides information to would-be Americans.

In the longer haul, Los Angeles will need to understand what the Trump threat has revealed: So many of us are immigrants—and so many others are one generation, one relative, one neighbor, or one co-worker away from the immigrants that Trump now threatens.

Because of this, immigrant integration is everyone’s business. And that will require that Los Angeles go beyond shoring up legal protections and promoting citizenship—key as these are—and also work to provide English classes for immigrant adults, strengthen education for their children, and secure a real toehold for immigrants in the local economy.

In the current choice between hope and fear, we Angelenos cannot adopt a false optimism—people really are under threat. Nor can we be paralyzed by panic. Instead, we must choose a third path: We must show the rest of the country what the future can be if we put aside racialized anxiety, celebrate the contributions of many people and cultures, and build the economic, social, and policy platforms for communities to thrive.

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The approach of the English—and therefore Americans at the time—was to model their tongue after Latin, a high-status language typically taught only to boys attending elite private schools. The study of Latin, besides being required for admission to the universities, was considered excellent mental training. Unfortunately, Latin and English aren’t a good fit—their structures are very different. Forcing English into a Latin template led to sentences that felt artificial.

Noah Webster, in many ways the father of American English, rejected these rules. A true revolutionary, Webster thought Americans should break free from the old country, take charge of their language, and build a new standard from the ground up—one that reflected the way most of his countrymen actually talked. Like others who participated in the new country’s founding, he took the democratic ideal seriously. “As an independent nation,” he declared in his 1789 book Dissertations on the English Language, “our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.”

As a linguist and former librarian, I had long pictured Webster as the stuffy 19th-century figure who gave his name to the ponderous dictionary displayed on a stand in the library. But, as I delved into his story for my book Founding Grammars, I realized that Webster was a visionary—even a radical—so far ahead of his time, in fact, that grammar and style guides are only now catching up with him.

Webster was born in West Hartford, Connecticut in 1758 to parents whose families could be traced back to the Plymouth Colony. As a student at Yale, Webster participated only briefly in the Revolution. In 1777, he marched with other West Hartford men, including his father and brother, to join the fighting at Saratoga, New York. Although they arrived after the battle was over, the experience stayed with Webster all his life. He could never speak of the American victory in later years without being moved to tears.

“For America in her infancy to adopt the present maxims of the old world would be to stamp the wrinkle of decrepit age upon the bloom of youth,” he wrote in Dissertations. Instead, he believed, this new nation needed a new language, to be used uniformly across the United States to cement new national bonds. Grammar books of the time were doing “much more hurt than good,” he complained. “The authors have labored to prove, what is obviously absurd, viz. that our language is not made right, and … have tried to make it over again, and persuade the English to speak by Latin rules, or by arbitrary rules of their own.”

He therefore proposed that American English ought to be based on the natural rules of the language and “the general practice of the nation.” In other words, if everyone said it, it ought to be standard. And he set about writing books and essays, and eventually creating dictionaries, in defense of his approach. The first volume of his three-volume grammar and spelling series for schoolchildren, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, appeared in 1783. In 1806, he published an early version of his dictionary—the first to feature American English—and followed up in 1828 with the groundbreaking American Dictionary of the English Language, which included 12,000 American words never before recorded.

Webster championed the use of more natural grammar, as in It is me and Who did she speak to? He embraced new words like electioneer and snack, repurposed old words like congress, and included slang like ain’t. And he introduced many new, simplified spellings, including dropping the u in words like favor and the k in words like music, and changing re to er in words like center.

Some reviewers criticized his new dictionary for including “low, coarse” Americanisms. Writing to his brother-in-law, Webster asked, “What is the difference, in point of authenticity, between respectable American usage and respectable English usage?” Clearly, he thought the answer was “none”—to him, they were equally legitimate if they were in daily use.

Webster did have some biases: For example, he was prejudiced in favor of his native New England dialect, which he thought had fewer faults than speech from other parts of the country. He did frown upon a few New England pronunciations that he considered nonstandard: For instance, he noted that the region’s “yeoman” class pronounced er like ar in words such as mercy. He was nonetheless one of the few language scholars of his day to recognize that linguistic diversity and evolving usages are natural.

Webster also occasionally pushed usages and spellings that most people thought were eccentric. For example, he fought a long, losing battle to make you a singular subject—trying to make saying you was standard. It was marginally acceptable in the early 19th century, but became less so over time. He also proposed extreme spellings, such as wimmen for women and tung for tongue, that never caught on.

Over the years, Webster’s political views grew more conservative. He was friendlier toward the mother country and less impressed with his fellow citizens than he had been in the patriotic fervor of his youth. He strongly disapproved of the folksy backwoods politician Andrew Jackson, elected as the first “people’s president.” Webster’s experiences with local and national politics persuaded him that Americans were better off governed by more patrician leaders, such as John Quincy Adams. In spite of his changed political outlook, however, he remained staunchly committed to the ingenuity and progress of American speech, including American word inventions and the common people’s grammar.

Webster would surely be pleased to know that modern Americans are beginning to come around to his grammatical pronouncements. Among others, Patricia T. O’Conner, author of Woe Is I, is in favor of using me and other object pronouns after to be. Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage, says that the rule against sentence-final prepositions is “spurious.” Voicing a sentiment that Webster would no doubt heartily approve, Garner admonishes, “Latin grammar should never straitjacket English grammar.”

Webster’s flexible attitudes would fit right into today’s world of language professionals, who post new words and phrases online and hold grammar forums on their blogs. From the intrepid word collectors of the American Dialect Society, who recently voted the hashtag #blacklivesmatter their word of the year, to the new generation of editors at the Associated Press Stylebook, who now approve of hopefully to mean “it is hoped,” it seems that the guardians of our lexicon are embracing language change these days.

And anyone can make contributions. We can all submit a new slang word or phrase to Urban Dictionary, along with our own definition, and anyone else can vote it up or down. At last count, selfie had 64 definitions, with the top vote-getter garnering over 7,000 thumbs-up. Regular folks like Peaches Monroee can introduce terms like on fleek, and see the term tweeted around the Internet in record time.

If Webster were still around, he would no doubt say that’s how things should be. He’d probably be surfing the Internet to collect material for the latest revision of his dictionary. And to those who would argue that English needs to stay rooted in the Old World, he might just tweet, “Bye Felicia.”

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When my name was called, I stifled an inner groan (I was very shy), walked to the front of the class, and began to speak, “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal …” Yes, I recited the Gettysburg Address. Presumably, I chose it for the same reason any teacher would have wanted me to: I was unconsciously reaffirming my Americanness.

I had a weakness for classic oratory and literature, soaking it all up with an enthusiasm most boys reserve for football or comic books. I am grateful memorization was in vogue back then. Thank you, Father Albert Daly, my ninth grade English teacher, for having us memorize passages from two of Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth and Julius Caesar, as well as Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice about how “the quality of mercy is not strained; it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”

Father Daly was also very fond of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and had us memorize several of its stanzas. My favorite is:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
and all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
await alike th’ inevitable hour;
the paths of glory lead but to the grave.

I also loved reading the classic tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table; about the travels of Ulysses, including his dangerous encounters with the waters between Scylla and Charybdis; and about the cultural and linguistic divide in England between Englishmen of Anglo-Saxon and Norman heritage in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. I liked novels of chivalry. A lot. What’s less understandable is that I also read Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield. I am still waiting to meet someone else who has done so.

If you’re thinking all of this made me something of a nerd, I’ll plead guilty, even as I hasten to add that I was also interested in baseball stats. But you haven’t heard the strangest part: My first language had not been English; it was Spanish.

My earliest childhood memories are of peaceful Saturday afternoons spent at our house in South Los Angeles with my maternal grandfather, Prudenciano Guillén. We listened together to a children’s program that was broadcast in Spanish and that featured a theme song about a little train, El Trenecito. Grandfather was from the town of Jiménez, in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, but left with his family (including our mother) when the chaos and violence of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 made life there impossible. Grandfather died in 1933.

Mother, who decided family issues, adopted English as our home language after a hospital nurse was unable to communicate with my brother Raul, who spoke only Spanish. I obviously took her mandate to heart.

For years after that, as my own Spanish atrophied from a lack of use, too many Spanish speakers made my life difficult with insults and demeaning comments about my inability to speak their—“our” —language. I came to feel besieged and tried to avoid contact with them and with the language itself. But I could not avoid relatives who joined the chorus. “¡Ay! Hijo, qué vergüenza! ¿Por qué no hablas español?” “What a shame, child! Why don’t you speak Spanish?“ Those were trying years.

I reenrolled at UCLA in 1953. Financial pressures had forced my withdrawal in 1948. I worked for three years and was drafted into the Army during the Korean War. I had learned that I was no engineer and now needed to declare a new major. The Veterans’ Administration gave me a battery of tests whose results suggested politics as a career choice. No way. I was on my own and asked myself what I really wanted to study. I decided to major in Spanish, a decision I never regretted.

Rodriguez at UCLA.

I began in a Spanish I class, and found myself aided immensely by my Latin experience (yes, this nerd had appreciated reading Julius Caesar not only in Shakespeare, but in the Emperor’s native language as well). The grammar of the Romance language, and the practice of memorizing new vocabulary, came second nature to me.

I read Cervantes’ El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha in a class devoted to that novel. I’ve read it twice more since. I took a course on Spain’s Golden Age, reading plays by Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca, among others, and courses that included the works of Benito Pérez Galdós, the poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, and one of my favorites, Miguel de Unamuno. Here was another canon for me to absorb and internalize, and incorporate into my identity, without eroding the value of the great English books I had discovered before. Too often these days we denigrate the value of a shared core of knowledge binding all Americans, in favor of a more balkanized notion that we should all only read the works of our own. That is unfortunate.

Upon graduating from UCLA, I began teaching Spanish at Huntington Park High School in 1957, and working toward my master’s degree. Then, fascinated by the law, I attended Loyola University Law School night school, while teaching my classes during the day.

I would go on to teach 35 of my total of 41 years in the classroom at Los Angeles Valley College, leading classes in Spanish in the daytime and law in the evening. They were fulfilling years, as my once solitary passion for learning became a passion for helping others to learn. And by learning Spanish, and introducing students to the great accomplishments of the language and its culture, I was connecting with the land my grandfather had fled a half-century earlier and, in fact, with every place where the language of Cervantes is spoken.

Years later, in conversation with a chemistry professor at the University of Mexico, I voiced some of my concerns on the question of my identity. He said, “Manuel, tú eres tan mexicano como yo.” “You are as Mexican as I am.” I appreciated the graciousness of the thought, but what he said could not possibly have been true.

I now feel deeply connected to my Mexican ancestry, without being fully Mexican, and without this rich cultural inheritance detracting from my deeply satisfying sense of rootedness here. And what that really makes me is pretty American.

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In English, if at all, even though it’s not anyone’s native language. You can swap out those nationalities for any other three hailing from different continents, and the answer will remain the same. Swap out a bar for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in China this week, and the attending heads of state from those three countries still have to communicate in English: It’s the only official language of the APEC, even when the APEC gathers in Beijing.

Mark Zuckerberg recently scored points during his own visit to Beijing when he made some remarks in Mandarin. The news sparked talk about whether China’s economic rise means Mandarin could someday rival English as a global language. Don’t count on it. Fluency in Mandarin will always be helpful for foreigners doing business within the important Chinese market, much like a mastery of Portuguese will give you a leg up in Brazil. But Mandarin poses no threat to English as the world’s bridge language, the second tongue people turn to when communicating and doing commerce across borders.

Thanks to the British empire, native English speakers are strategically sprinkled across the globe, from the British Isles to North America to East Africa to Southern Asia and down to Australia. Beyond that, it is the native language of shared popular culture–music, movies, even sport, increasingly, with the recent ascendance of England’s Premier League (soccer is the one form of global pop culture not dominated by the United States). And English is undeniably the language of the technologies connecting us all together. Most languages don’t even bother to coin terms for things like “the Internet” or “text” or “hashtag,” appropriating the English techspeak instead.

It’s little wonder that an estimated 2 billion people will speak functional English by 2020, the vast majority of them having learned it as their second language.

English, we often forget, is an inherently neutral language: There is no gender in English as there are in Romance languages. There are no class or generational distinctions baked into the language, as there are with so many languages that feature different you’s with different verb conjugations–the deferential you (boss, elder, stranger) versus the familiar you (friend, subordinate, child). Ours is a radically egalitarian and modern language, and it is simpler and more direct as a result. English also lacks the tonal nuance of some Asian languages, where a shift in tone can change the meaning of a word or phrase, or the complexity of grammatical declensions that drive students of Latin, Greek, German, or Russian to despair.

English is also more politically neutral than we often think. And any relative decline over time of America’s global power and influence will actually help, rather than hurt, the cause of English worldwide, further decoupling people’s perception of the language from their perceptions of the United States and its influence. English is associated with freedom. There is no major power systematically censoring English content on the Internet or blocking access to opposing worldviews. Even Islamist Jihadist propagandists would concede that English is a convenience in spreading their word.

The French–whose language was the last viable alternative in the race to become the world’s lingua franca–are understandably sore about the triumph of English. But even French companies have had to fall in line, accepting English as their organizational language. In what amounted to a telling parody of modern France, one grievance underlying a recent Air France strike was the airline union’s anger at the adoption of English as the default language for internal communications across its global operations.

The odds against a Chinese dialect ever gaining traction as an international language are formidable, for linguistic, economic, cultural, and political reasons. For starters, the language is just too hard for outsiders to attain fluency, at least for outsiders who can’t devote themselves full-time to memorizing thousands of characters over a number of years. Then there is the inconvenient fact that Mandarin doesn’t hold sway throughout all of China.

It’s true that China’s domestic market is becoming more important by the day, and so Mandarin is becoming more important to those who want to succeed in that market. But China’s global aspirations will make it complicit to English cross-border dominance: Its own emerging multinational companies will discover, like European and Japanese ones before them, that they have to adopt English as their business language to succeed beyond their home market.

The cultural incentives for mastering Mandarin aren’t great either. Whatever its economic and military might, China’s soft power is notoriously weak. Sadly, the People’s Republic is seen as a trendsetter in all the wrong ways–quashing dissent, blocking speech, insisting on conformity and subservience.

Indeed, resistance to any claim the Chinese language may have for global status may be strongest in the country’s own neighborhood, where nations nervous of China’s intentions are eager for continued American engagement and comfortable with English as their bridge language. Year after year, the PEW Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project surveys show that people in nations like the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan are far more comfortable with America than with China as regional superpower. And so, again, it’s no accident that English is the only official language of the APEC and also the smaller ASEAN, the regional grouping of Southeast Asian nations.

This cordon sanitaire containing China’s cultural (and if it comes to it, military) expansion is one of the lesser-appreciated dynamics of today’s world, one that augurs well for the cause of the English language and American cultural influence. All the hype surrounding China’s rise to great power status can make us lose sight of the fact that what realtors might call the “China Adjacent Region” (let’s call it CAR)–the crescent encompassing Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, the rest of Southeast Asia, and India–far surpasses China in population and economic power.

So don’t expect Chinese to take on English for global preeminence. That’s the good news for us as Americans. The bad news–at least for Americans thinking they don’t need to learn a second language–is that English’s very universality will make more and more of the world’s population multilingual. If all our kids speak is English, they’ll be at a disadvantage in a globalized labor force–because everyone else will speak it too. But at least we get to pick our second language.

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Bergen blends psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to put forth a new theory of how the brain understands words and sentences. He argues that people understand language by creating experiences in their minds—“embodied simulations”—that mirror interactions in the physical and social worlds.

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