> I'm not talking about lowering standards, I'm talking about lowering barriers.
One and the same. Making it easier to join a group necessarily lowers the barrier for joining said group which necessarily lowers the standard of said group. There are entire books written about this problem which leads to it being impossible to build large above-average skilled teams.
No need to bring identity politics into engineering practice. They have as much place here as they do in getting a pilot license.
There is a minimum bar to pass, and part of that bar is speaking a common parlance with members of your professional body from the rest of the world. I'm sorry you feel upset that English happened to be the language of choice for that, I personally just invested the time to learn it. I get paid more than doctors or pilots with the same amount of experience as me, so I'm not going to start complaining about satisfying the same language requirements that they deal with.
Sure, you can require someone to be fluent in English before you're willing to hire them for your team of programmers (a standard). That doesn't mean people who don't want to work for you should be required to learn English before they can start to learn programming (a barrier).
It is not necessary to be male, white, or English speaking, to be an excellent engineer, and yet those groups are significantly over represented.