Tonight ABC will air the finals of the National Spelling Bee live in prime time. Round Four of the competition will kick off at Noon Eastern Time on ESPN with the favorite, Samir Patel, attempting his next word. I have to confess, I love the Bee. The kids are hilarious to watch. At their age, they'd be awkward anyway, but when you add in the fact that they're so into spelling it's a freak show-but in a good way.

So what does the Bee have to do with immigration? Take a look at the names of some of the kids still in the competition. Sure, we have a John Tamplin and a Katharine Close, but there's also Natalia Vélez, Kendra Yoshinaga, Allion Salvador, Kavya Shivashankar and Aishwarya Pastapur. In other words, the Bee is the classic American melting pot.

It's kind of ironic that these kids are competing in a spelling bee. It implies that at some point, their ancestors actually learned English. We used to expect that. We used to expect something of the people that came to America. We expected them to do what they had to build a better life for their children. Now it's all about what illegal immigrants expect from us: freedom to break our laws, social services and bilingual communications everywhere.

I've had a romantic view of immigration in the past, but the whining and entitled attitudes of so many illegal immigrants and their advocates has changed me. America, as a nation, has ceased to ask anything of illegal immigrants. We're like teachers who pass students just to move them up and out of their class. The students (or the illegal immigrants) get away with something now, but in the long run by passing them on, we ultimately fail them.

I'm mad at the way illegal immigrants treat America, but I'm also angry with the way we treat illegal immigrants. Our government's permissive attitude is only going to spell disaster for those folks we're dooming to a lifetime in the shadows. I desperately want to see America live up to the ideal that we'll see on the Spelling Bee's stage tonight.