There is a lot of money for the adminstration in bilingual education. I wish I could expound on it but I'm up way past my bedtime and not that coherent :o) People who are here legally, esp. the naturalized citizens, pay a lot of money to be here. They want the best. While they may be working three jobs eighteen hours a day, they went their children to be doctors and lawyers and not dishwashers and maids. An educated Mexican child can't be shoved into a special ed class.
This is very important. There are Hispanic parents who have sued to get their kids out of "bilingual" classes (where they learn bad Spanish and no English at all) because they know this will hold them back, but the administrations are adamant in keeping kids in these classes. In New York, there was one family that sued because they were 2nd generation Hispanics who spoke only English at home - but their child was assigned to a bilingual class because he had an Hispanic last name.
Once upon a time, we had the ideal of assimilation of immigrants. Settlement houses in NY were an attempt to help European immigrants, particularly Eastern European Jews, adapt to America, and many groups, such as the Catholic Church, ran schools and programs of various sorts to help their immigrant members get an education and become Americans. Now the ideal is keeping everybody in their own separate ghetto, where the Dems can ride herd on them and let them out only to vote every so often.
I think the attitude toward immigrants among many people would be considerably different if it was perceived that immigrants actually just wanted to be Americans, like the rest of us. But the left has every reason not to want this to happen.