Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster.

• Author: Glastris, Paul

One of my favorite Chicago haunts is Devon Avenue, a gritty strip of brick storefronts on the city's far north side. Once a middle-class Jewish shopping district, a place where women bought bat mitzvah dresses, Devon was going to seed in the seventies as upscale Jewish families headed for the suburbs. But then some enterprising Indian immigrants opened a few modest sari shops, the city's first. Business boomed, and soon dozens more Indian stores opened, hawking handmade jewelry, burlap sacks of basmati rice and 220-volt appliances for smuggling to relatives in protectionist India. Now, on summer evenings, Indian families from all over the Midwest parade up and down the avenue in saris and Nehru jackets, past the restaurants and retail stores, the sweet, musty scent of sandalwood incense wafting out of open doors on air-conditioned breezes.

Though Indians dominate Devon Avenue, other groups shop here, too. American-born Orthodox Jews hit the kosher butchers and religious bookstores. Assyrians sit in shabby all-male cafes, playing backgammon and staring menacingly out the window, their open shirts revealing mats of thick black hair. Greek greengrocers stack boxes of mangos on the sidewalk, stiffly enforcing the rule against mixing and matching mangos from one box with another, a rule which women of every ethnic group love to break. Russian men in threadbare suits sit with their wives for hours on sidewalk benches, watching the melting-pot spectacle with vague disapproval.

Unlike the immigrants, with their sectarian suspicions, I take a catholic delight in the whole Devon scene: It's a cheap alternative to the exotic foreign travel that I wish I could afford to do. This, however, makes me a traitor in the eyes of Peter Brimelow. A conservative, British-born senior editor at Forbes, and a naturalized American citizen, Brimelow argues in Alien Nation that the benefits of immigration have been hyped and the costs played down by an elite class of immigration advocates - economists, congressional aides, and journalists who derive a strange psychological pleasure from the presence of exotic foreigners on U.S. soil, a pleasure most other Americans do not share.

Elites from both parties share this enthusiasm, though for somewhat different reasons. Liberals welcome immigrants out of humanitarian impulse, the prospect of more Democratic voters or, for multi-culturalists, diversity for diversity's sake. Conservative free-marketers stress the economic benefits of immigrants, while neoconservatives see their work ethic and family values as antidotes for American moral decline. Yet beneath this bipartisan immigration adoration, argues Brimelow, lies an ugly truth: Compared to native-born Americans, immigrants are less skilled, use more welfare, pay less taxes, and exacerbate the gap between rich and poor. Rather than admit this, the "alienists," as Brimelow dubs the elites, have kept the door wide open, without the support of the American people, while tilting the mix in favor of immigrants from the Third World. The eventual result, he concludes, will be a country whose traditional racial and cultural mix is so profoundly changed that, decades from now, America could look like Beirut.

Brimelow's views on ethnic mixing are, I will argue, hysterical and unsound. But his views on elites have a ring of truth. "Alienists" from across the political spectrum have long promoted large-scale immigration while ignoring public opinion polls which for years have shown that the majority of Americans believe too many immigrants are being let in. In Europe, such cavalier disregard of public opinion toward immigration has led to race riots, third-party challenges, and sweeping restrictionist laws.

We're not that far gone, but in today's stringent economy Americans are more willing than ever to see immigrants as a threat. Consider the successful passage last fall of Proposition 187, the California ballot measure that would deny social services to illegal immigrants. (Copycat measures have already spread to other states.) Florida and California officials are suing the federal government over the costs of providing social services to immigrants. The Contract With America even contains a provision that would make nearly all of the nation's 10 million legal resident aliens ineligible for an array of federal programs.

Though Brimelow's book is deeply flawed, there are good reasons to take it seriously. His fellow conservatives now control immigration policy and his arguments could push a fair number of them into the nativist camp. A portion of the American public (though I don't think a majority) shares Brimelow's racial fears. And his anti-elitist arguments are almost bound to play well with the Perot and Limbaugh sets. But one of Brimelow's most powerful allies is the silence of immigration proponents on the system's very real problems. The "alienists" of both parties have ceded the debate, and nativists like Brimelow are filling the vacuum.

In Alien Nation, the main target of Brimelow's wrath is the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendment of 1965. Sponsored by then-freshman Senator Ted Kennedy, the law abolished Preferential treatment for European immigrants in favor of granting visas to...