In Germany, the future is bilingual
According to new data, taken from the Statistisches Bundesamt, one out of five people in Germany has a migration background.
Most of Germany's immigrants or German citizens with a migration background, come from Turkey, Poland and Russia, but there are a lot of people from other Eastern European countries, as well as Italians, Spanish, South Americans... and you'll find Asians and North Americans, too.
Especially if you live in a city, you'll encounter people who are or whose family once came from a different country, every day. On the bus, there'll be people speaking in foreign languages, often (but not always) the parents speaking in their mother tongue and the children replying in German.
One big problem for migrants is not only getting used to living in Germany, learning how to speak German, being accepted by the German society... no, another problem which a lot of people forgot about in the past is that a lot of children born to migrant families already living in Germany, lose their mother tongue. They might be able to speak German perfectly, but have difficulty with their mother tongue, especially in written language. It is also important for them to hear their mother tongue outside of their homes as well. Otherwise it might happen, that, especially young children who enter kindergarden, might stop speaking their mother tongue if they notice all of the other kids are only speaking German and feel "different".
Nowadays, there are over 600 bilingual schools in Germany, 150 of them being primary schools, teaching children from non-German backgrounds their mother tongue while also making German children benefit from a bilingual education.
Starting back the in 1970s, there were a German-French few bilingual schools after Germany and France signed the treaty on Franco-German cooperation. Now there is a wider variety of bilingual schools and classes are not only offered in German and French, but also in German and, for example, English, Spanish and Turkish.
As I mentioned before, not only children from migrant families attend bilingual schools. Many German parents think it is a good investion for their children's future if they attend a bilingual school and get fluent in another language, apart from their mother tongue, as well. It is easier for them to the learn the foreign language if they are surrounded by children whose mother tongue is English, Spanish, French, etc. Children from both backgrounds (migrant and non-migrant) can benefit from each other by not only learning together, but also learning from each other.

