One of the nation’s top immigration experts blistered today’s political class for failing immigrants by not teaching them patriotism and Americanism.

Mark Krikorian, the Executive Director of the Center of Immigration Studies, which released a report on Monday that found a record 62 million people in America speak a language other than English at home, said recent immigrants are not different from the waves of previous immigrants in wanting to assimilate. But those previous waves did not have political elites who kowtowed to salad-bowl ethnic groups insisting that their cultures be put above America’s common culture that has served as the ultimate unifying force.

“I don’t think the immigrants really are that different,” he said on Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125. “It’s us. It’s our political class that’s different.”

He said when an immigrant family takes their kids to school, they are asking the school to “please teach our kid what it is to be an American” like his immigrant grandparents did. Krikorian told host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon that his mother, a daughter of immigrants, memorized the Gettysburg Address and sang “Hail, Columbia” when she attended school.

“What do you think they’re learning in the L.A. Unified School District now?” Krikorian asked. “It ain’t that.”

He said this is not the case because today’s immigrants are demanding salad-bowl policies. Rather, Krikorian blamed the Hispanic political class and everyone else who believes in political correctness and multicultuaralism that think “it’s bad to make people assimilate. It’s wrong. Patriotism is atavistic and kind of dirty.”

“They are just not learning what we want them to learn because we’re not teaching it to them,” he concluded of today’s immigrants.