Diana West is unhappy with Bush's blase attitude towards immigration:
"Do you think we assimilate immigrants as well as in previous waves?" Mr. Bush's answer: "Absolutely."
Obviously, Mr. Bush hasn't ridden a rush-hour bus where no English is spoken, or listened to a business office recording asking "oprima el numero dos."
This sort of thing gets tossed around a lot. Doesn't Bush realize that the immigrants speak Mexican, rather than American? Has he ever seen the face of a child who's been forced to "press 1 for English?" Doesn't he realize how different this all is?
But these fears of linguistic separation are old hat. You think a bus in Austin, Chicago, circa 1930, after Italian immigration had pumped the tiny suburb's population from 4,000 to 120,000, had a whole lot of English on it? Doubtful. And you didn't get business recordings in other languages because there were no recordings during previous waves of immigration. Hispanic immigration happens to be the first to occur during the era of automated answering services.
The relevant metric here is whether the second-generation assimilates, as it's they, and successive generations, who will remain in the country. And in that, the data is clear. Mexican immigrants assimilate. In the first generation, English proficiency is undeniably poor. Only 24 percent on Mexican immigrants speak it well, as compared to 40 percent of Asian immigrants. But the intergenerational transmission of English fluency is higher among Mexicans than among any other immigrant group. 50 percent of the native-born children of Mexican immigrants acquire proficiency while still in the household, putting them on par with second-generation Asians, and of those Mexicans who are second-generation+ (either out of the household or third generation or more) proficiency is 86 percent. Indeed, if you control for other relevant factors (age, income, etc), second- and third-generation Hispanics are much more likely than other immigrants to speak English fluently.
So in this, President Bush is right. America is perfectly capable of assimilating immigrants. Even if, along the way, Diana West has to hear some Spanish spoken on the bush.
