At a campaign stop in Powder Springs, Ga., yesterday, Barack Obama discussed why our children should to learn to speak Spanish:

I don’t understand when people are going around worrying about we need to have English-only. They want to pass a law, we want just … we want English-only.

Now I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But … understand this: Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English—they’ll learn English—you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language

You know, it’s embarrassing … when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and all we can say is “Merci beaucoup.” Right?

In response to Obama’s speech, Jim Geraghty over at the National Review’s The Campaign Spot points out:

Obama seems to be conflating demands for English-only curriculum to hasten the assimilation of English as a Second Language students with opposition to foreign language courses. I have never encountered anyone who demanded an “English-only” Spanish lesson.

Obama’s last paragraph is fine; it’s the second one that is full of a drastic misunderstanding of what motivates those English-only argument. Maybe in the circles Obama travels in, every immigrant has learned English, or is well along the way. But a walk down the street in many neighborhoods across the country reveal that quite a few immigrants not only haven’t learned it yet, but they live and work in separate, out-of-the-spotlight enclaves in which they never need to learn it, and will never need to learn it. It’s a formula for cultural Balkanization. (Notice this is not merely a phenomenon of Spanish-speaking immigrants.)

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air adds:

Obama’s argument here makes no sense.  He’s complaining that Americans don’t speak the native language when we visit Europe, but that we don’t speak the immigrant language when people move to the United States. With that argument, shouldn’t we expect Europeans to speak English when we travel there?

I agree that everyone should learn a foreign language. … However, to argue that Americans should learn Spanish as a higher priority than insisting that immigrants learn English is nonsense, and Obama’s argument for it is a giant non-sequitur. It carries a strong whiff of America-bashing, too.