IIRC, Bush's first plan, a year ago, put a lot of emphasis on assimilation requirements and aid to assimilation. This was something immigrants had 100 years ago (although from the private sector, mostly settlement houses and the Catholic Church, through its school system). They weren't encouraged to remain separate, although now in our "multicultural" society, everybody is encouraged to remain separate and build their own little ethnic strongholds. Bush did withdraw a lot of the "bilingual education" funding, although in many cases, the states and cities simply replaced it. So it would be necessary to ensure that the states and municipalities couldn't make an end-run around federal policy once again (as they did by refusing to check ID or citizenship status, for example).
I thought this was a good point:
But our poll respondents believe America has spent so much money rebuilding and otherwise supporting foreign countries that redirecting some funds to deal head-on with this pressing domestic problem suddenly seems smart.
The lamestream media wants to discuss the terms of our surrender to the problem of unlimited immigration. This idea is just nonsense.
It’s not a solution unless it focusses on getting America to a point where we have only the people we want immigrating, no more and no less, and we have a way of ensuring our citizens area assimilated Americans.
“This was something immigrants had 100 years ago (although from the private sector, mostly settlement houses and the Catholic Church, through its school system). They weren’t encouraged to remain separate, although now in our “multicultural” society, everybody is encouraged to remain separate and build their own little ethnic strongholds.”
The amensty will destroy the assimilation concept for a simple reason: 60+% of them will be from Mexico. This never happened before in American immigration.
Assimilation happens when you have a lot of different groups coming together. No one group can hold on to their language and have members function discretely. But if LA is 70% Mexican, the de facto language will be Spanish. Hola, Mexico Norte!
Add to that bilingual education and multi-culturalism and you have a recipe for cultivating perpetual enclaves of another culture.