You are comparing apples and oranges: English is a compulsory subject in many Asian and other countries, but a foreign language is elective in most American schools. How many Americans take "5 years" of any foreign language at the secondary education level? That's a statistically insignificant population: "most of our students take no more than two years of foreign language at the high school level, usually in the ninth and tenth grades" (Elizabeth L. Webb, Chronicle of Higher Education, <http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2001/abroad/103.htm>). The result is that most Americans, other than first-generation immigrants, are decidedly monolingual (that is, if we set aside the fact that many of them have trouble writing in English, too).
If American schools are to introduce foreign language as a subject of compulsory mass education for all, the result will certainly resemble Asian results, too: a few of them will major in it and become proficient in one foreign language or another, but the rest won't learn it enough to be able to use it as a means of rudimentary everyday communication, let alone professional communication (just as they don't learn any other subject well enough, except those they need for their professions).
Compulsory foreign-language education has one virtue, though: it works as affirmative action for women, for women are better at learning a language, native or foreign, than men. If America makes foreign language education compulsory, and especially if it makes it a compulsory part of SAT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, etc., it will make women dominate the weaker sex even more than now in education. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>