“It sends the wrong message when people are being catered to in their own language,” says Bob Vandervoort, the Executive Director of advocacy group Proenglish.

His group lobbies for legislation – both at the federal and state level – to make English the official language of government business. “If you go back 100 years in this country, there was a real effort to encourage immigrants who came here to assimilate, to consider ourselves a melting pot. And we’ve gone away from that with the promotion of multiculturalism and bilingualism and I think that’s a concern.”

For bilingual Republicans, though, assimilation and Spanish-language outreach are far from mutually exclusive. They say it’s most important to get their conservative message across to Latinos any way they can. Especially en Español.

“This is a traditional and historical battle that we fight, but history’s clearly on the side of assimilation,” says South Carolina Republican Mick Mulvaney. “Simply speaking to people in their native tongue doesn’t encourage Balkanization and it doesn’t discourage English. They want to learn English.”