Krauthammer on assimilation
English spoken here: Cutting bilingual ed is the key to forcing immigrants to assimilate

The key to assimilation of course, is language. The real threat to the United States is not immigration per se, but bilingualism and, ultimately, biculturalism. Having grown up in Canada, where a language divide is a recurring source of friction and fracture, I can only wonder at those who want to duplicate that plague in the United States.

The good news is that the vogue for bilingual education is now waning. It has been abolished by referendum in California, Arizona and even Massachusetts.

As the results in California have shown with Hispanic children, it delays assimilation by perhaps a full generation. Those in “English immersion” have more than twice the rate of English proficiency of those in the “bilingual” system (being taught other subjects in Spanish while being gradually taught English).

By all means we should try to control immigration. Nonetheless, given our geography, our tolerant culture and the magnetic attraction of our economy, illegals will always be with us. Our first task, therefore, should be abolishing bilingual education everywhere, and requiring that our citizenship tests have strict standards for English language and American civics.

The way to prevent European-like immigration catastrophes is to turn every immigrant – and most surely his children – into an American. Who might one day grow up to be our next Zalmay Khalilzad [US Ambassador to Afghanistan].

I heartily agree with Dr. Krauthammer. Not only with his position on language, but also on civics, with an emphasis on values, as I said last March: But I do know that all children need structure, and that values are the foundation of that structure, here in the USA or anywhere in the world.