Bernie Sanders (D)
Bernie Sanders receives an overall grade of: F
Bernie Sanders receives a grade of 
on the issue of Official English.
Bernie Sanders has been opposing and mis-characterizing official English for nearly 20 years. In his 1997 book, An Outsider In The House, then-Representative Sanders wrote “The ‘English Only’ bill mandates that all official communication by the federal government be in English. This means that members of Congress from a heavily Hispanic or Polish district, for instance, would be prohibited from communicating with their constituents in Spanish or Polish. Election, tax, and other information needed by millions of citizens would be available only in English. President Clinton indicates that he will veto this legislation, and the bill will not go anywhere–not even to the Senate. But it passes (sic) in the House by a vote of 259 to 169. 8 Republicans, 160 Democrats, and I vote against the bill.” In June of 2007, Sanders voted ‘No’ on a Senate bill that would have made English the official language of the federal government.
Bernie Sanders receives a grade of on the issue of Bilingual Ballots.
Bernie Sanders has not openly advocated for an expanded use of multilingual ballots at taxpayer expense. However, he supports universal automatic registration at age 18, elimination of any kind of photo ID requirement for registration, and “no fault absentee ballots.” Sanders, like Clinton, supports the use of bilingual ballots that are currently mandated by the Voting Rights Act in specified districts with either 10,000 speakers of a language or 5% of the voting age population. Sanders and Clinton both ignore the fact that legally naturalized citizens are required to pass an English proficiency test, and so there is no need for bilingual ballots–unless the goal is to encourage non-citizen illegal aliens to vote. In sum, there is no difference between Sanders and Clinton as regards voter registration and bilingual ballots.
Bernie Sanders receives a grade of on the issue of Amnesty.
Bernie Sanders’ 2016 policy position aims at a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal aliens currently residing in the USA, whom he refers to as 11 million new Americans. Sanders would expand President Obama’s fiat executive DAPA and DACA orders that provide legal status and access to taxpayer-funded social programs to the children of illegal aliens, their parents, the parents of anchor babies, and the parents of legal permanent residents. Sanders supports Obama’s Parole-In-Place policy that grants a green card to any illegal alien sponsored by anyone with legal resident status; the sponsor need not be a citizen. Sanders advocates for relaxing the standards of admission and screening for refugees and asylees–all without any strong English language requirements. Sanders offers only vague promises of increased funding for English training, but nothing close to the English testing requirement that naturalized citizens must pass. There is, in essence, no daylight between the open borders policies of Sanders and Clinton.
Bernie Sanders receives a grade of on the issue of Puerto Rican Statehood.
Bernie Sanders has remained silent on the question of Puerto Rican statehood and his campaign has not issued a statement on the necessity of a referendum as a pre-condition of Congress taking a vote on admission to the Union. Sanders traveled to the island in September of 2015 and blamed Wall Street for Puerto Rico’s central and municipal government debt: “The lenders are not going to get 100% of their dollars back. They’re going to have to take a haircut — probably a pretty significant haircut.” Sanders advocated the same policies as Clinton, e.g., immediate Chapter 9 bankruptcy protections for the central and local governments and public corporations, as well as increasing the Medicaid, Medicare, and Medicare Advantage funding rates.
Bernie Sanders receives a grade of on the issue of on the issue of English-in-the-workplace.
Bernie Sanders’s campaign has not issued a position statement on the issue of the right of employers to require employees to speak English on the job for all things work-related, such as business transactions, customer interactions, company communications, and meetings. However, his track record makes it clear that he is opposed to English-on-the job policies. As a Senator in 2008, Sanders voted against an amendment (S.AMDT.4222) to an appropriations bill (S.CON.RES.70) whose purpose was “To take $670,000 used by the EEOC in bringing actions against employers that require their employees to speak English, and instead use the money to teach English to adults through the Department of Education’s English Literacy/Civics Education State Grant program.” It is abundantly clear from this ‘No’ vote that Sanders opposes English on the job policies.
Bernie Sanders receives a grade of on the issue of Multiculturalism & Assimilation.
Bernie Sanders is a registered Independent who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate. He openly avows that he is a socialist, but on the campaign trail, he has explained that this means he advocates for social democracy on the European models of France and Germany. This leads to his policies of free health care and college education for all by raising taxes on corporations and individuals, as well as heavy-handed government regulation. The goal of European social democracy and Sanders’s socialism is to replace the American tradition of justice, understood as the equality of all citizens before the law, with a radically egalitarian notion of justice, understood as equality of outcome ensured by social programs and wealth re-distribution. To his credit, Sanders does not cloak this ambition in the standard leftist rhetoric of multiculturalism, identity politics, ethnicity, or gender. Sanders is an unabashed practitioner of class warfare rhetoric who is open about his full embrace of European Socialism. It follows that the only kind of assimilation Sanders cares about is his desire to assimilate the free market and the economic freedom of individuals into an ever-expanding administrative state in which government is run by unaccountable bureaucrats instead of the duly elected representatives chosen by the people.