Christian Schneider provides a bit of Wisconsin and political history:

In 1889, a Milwaukee Journal reporter had a great scoop: the Wisconsin Legislature had just passed the Bennett Law, which required that children between the ages of 7 and 14 attend school for 60 days a year. The law was sure to be controversial — a Journal editorial griped that no 7-year-old child should be forced to go to school.

But as former Journal reporter Robert W. Wells noted, the reporter blew the real story. On the day before it was to be signed into law, someone at the newspaper read the fine print and realized that the new statute mandated that classes be taught in English — a direct shot at the German communities around the state that had yet to assimilate into American culture. “The Bennett Law required every school in the state — parochial as well as public – to teach reading, writing, arithmetic and American history in the language spoken by Queen Victoria, not Otto von Bismarck,” noted Wells.

When a Journal front page headline blared “MUST USE ENGLISH,” it sent the German community into action. Many Catholic and Lutheran schools in the Milwaukee area taught all their classes in German, as the parents demanded. The German newspapers incited their readers to oppose the law — even the Milwaukee Sentinel, a Republican paper, suggested that changes be made to the law that its own favored legislators had enacted. Soon, Republicans who voted for the law were cast from office, as Democrats won the governorship in 1890.

This week, Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio proposed an amendment to the much-publicized federal immigration bill that would require illegal immigrants to pass an English test before being granted American citizenship. Rubio’s amendment is more stringent than the original bill, which only required that an applicant be enrolled in an English language course.

The bill’s opponents have derided the proposal as “amnesty” for illegal immigrants, but Rubio’s amendment further demonstrates why that claim is bogus. The English requirement is one of the many hurdles illegal immigrants would have to cross in order to earn citizenship — a process that could take up to 13 years. (In the 1880s, all one had to do to be a resident of Wisconsin was to live in the state for a year and sign an oath of loyalty.) …

And while the Bennett Law that the Madison State Journal supported wasn’t the right prescription in the 19th century, the compulsory instruction of English now appears to be an aid, not a hindrance. The immigration bill is a chance to verify that people currently living beneath the shadows of the law learn English and get the tools to move up. Failure to pass an earned legalization bill will deny too many people the economic mobility that America promises.