20% don't speak English at home?

Gotta' love this headline from the AP:

20% of people living in U.S. speak language other than English at home

But check out the details in the story:

Nearly 1 in 5 people living in the United States speak a language at home other than English, according to new Census data that illustrate the wide-ranging effects of immigration. ...

Nationwide, the number of immigrants reached an all-time high of 37.5 million in 2006, affecting incomes and education levels in many cities across the country. But the effects have not been uniform.

In most states, immigrants have added to the number of those lacking a high school diploma, with almost half of those from Latin America falling into that category.

Note that this is the vastly greater percentage of the "illegal" immigrant category.

However, at the other end of the education spectrum, Asian immigrants are raising average education levels in many states, with nearly half of them holding at least a bachelor's degree.

"There is no one-size-fits-all policy that you could apply for all immigrant groups," said Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau. "I think most of the attention has been on low-skilled workers coming from Mexico. But we have 10 million immigrants from Asia, a number that's growing." ...

Yes, and most of them are educated (see below) and are net "contributors" rather than "recipients" from the system. Oh, and aren't here illegally.

...the differences in education levels among immigrants from Asia and those from Latin America. Together, the groups account for about 80 percent of all immigrants.

About 48 percent of Asian immigrants held at least a bachelor's degree, compared with about 11 percent of immigrants from Latin America. Among people born in the United States, about 27 percent were college graduates.

At the other end of the spectrum, 47 percent of adult immigrants from Latin America lacked a high school diploma, compared with 16 percent of Asian immigrants and 13 percent of people born in the United States.

Those numbers are fueling overall increases in the number of high school dropouts in four states: Nevada, Arizona, Colorado and Texas, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

And this gives you a hint about how a SANE immigration policy would work. You import people who improve the overall talent pool. You don't import the poor and uneducated...just because they'll work for a few bucks an hour.