John Fonte is an old friend and ally on many issues, but his recent assertion that I oppose any comprehensive immigration reform package that would end bilingual education, abolish multilingual ballots, outlaw dual citizenship, and end affirmative action preferences for immigrants and their children is not just fantasy but calumny of the highest order. I’m not sure where John Fonte has been on these issues over the years, but for almost four decades I’ve been on the frontlines fighting to end these policies. My involvement goes back to the early 1970s, as I’ve written about extensively in my memoir, An Unlikely Conservative.

In 1974, while on the professional staff of the House Judiciary Committee I fought efforts to include bilingual ballots in the 1975 Voting Rights Act reauthorization, albeit unsuccessfully, and have testified against the provision at almost every Congressional reauthorization since then, including most recently here. My first book, Out of the Barrio, is an extended polemic against multiculturalism and ethnic preferences, especially as they have dominated public policy toward Hispanics. Most importantly, I founded the Center for Equal Opportunity in 1995 precisely because there was a dearth of leadership on these issues within the conservative movement. Indeed, opposing the very programs that Fonte absurdly suggests I favor is the very raison d’etre of CEO.

John’s reference may date back to an exchange we had on Frontpage in October 2007. In that exchange (excerpts here), John proposed that I agree to end “anti-assimilation measures before we increase low-skilled immigration.” This is what I wrote in response:

. . . John’s challenge makes no sense. I oppose dual citizenship, preferences based on race or ethnicity (and sex), bilingual education, multi-lingual ballots, etc., and have spent my entire professional career trying to rid the country of these policies. But if we were to eliminate net immigration tomorrow, we’d still be stuck with this nonsense for the foreseeable future. The primary beneficiaries of affirmative action remain American-born blacks—not foreign-born Latinos or immigrant blacks for that matter. While a few colleges may appoint Peruvian- or Nigerian-born professors to fulfill their diversity quotients, it is American-born blacks, and to a considerable lesser extent Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, who benefit from such programs, especially in college admissions. And the federal bilingual education program was created in 1968 primarily for Mexican American children, not for immigrants (as counter-intuitive as that might seem), and was later modified to include a bicultural component aimed specifically at Mexican Americans. So, too, bilingual ballots were added to the 1975 amendments to the Voting Rights Act as an appeasement to Mexican American and Puerto Rican groups clamoring for the same clout in drawing voting district lines as blacks had attained, not because there were large numbers of non-English speaking persons eligible to vote.

I’d be delighted to see assimilation provisions in any immigration reform package–the problem is that John’s allies in the anti-natalist immigration restriction movement could care less about assimilation. Their main objective is to reduce population, not to insist that newcomers become American. They want fewer Americans of all colors, period.