San Diego School Superintendent announced it would not allow ICE

[DFW]

3. Here in Germany

Some 25 years ago, a French family moved into our neighborhood. He was an engineer of some kind, and his company had stationed him in Düsseldorf for three years to sort out some technical thing or other. There were two small girls in the family, and the younger one was in the class of my younger daughter at the local elementary school. I volunteered one day to help out the class because they were short of staff, and the French girl spent the whole morning telling me about her family and her home back in France--in French, of course. She didn't speak a word of German yet, but her parents placed her cold turkey into the local German elementary school. The class teacher was stunned, commenting that this girl never said a word in class, and yet here she was talking a blue streak to me. I said, "that is probably due to the fact that she hasn't the faintest idea what you are saying."

But children pick up things quickly (she and my daughter were 7 or 8). By the end of the second year, this girl not only spoke accent-free perfect German, but was also among the top three in her class.

Can you imagine how far she would have gotten if there had been some kind of cultural police lurking to exclude kids who didn't speak German?