Yet after decades in a country where people have only ever needed English to get by – as opposed to a place like Sweden for instance, where the national language is not English but English education starts early in primary school – the demographics are rapidly changing.

“So great and so rapid are the shifts in the country's population, that, in the coming decade, the US is set to be transformed far more than other nations,” the Brookings Institution’s William H Frey wrote for the BBC last year.

He is referring to the fact that, in 2018, almost half of young people in the US are from ethnic minority groups. Generation Z – loosely defined as those born after the year 2000 – is set to be the most racially diverse generation in US history, a figure powered by immigration and biracial relationships. And in 2011, the US Census reported that “the use of a language other than English at home increased by 148% between 1980 and 2009.”

These rapid changes could be part of what’s fuelling anti-immigrant sentiment among many white voters in the US. But the diversification of an already diverse country is a genie that can’t be put back into the bottle.