It’s an argument that holds considerable appeal for many, not least immigrants themselves. I should know: My family immigrated to this country – legally – from the late Soviet Union in 1989, and for many years I subscribed to the cheerfully naïve view that immigration was an unqualified good.

In part, this was instilled by the American public-education system. As a fourth-grader, I remember being taken on a class trip to Ellis Island, where we were instructed to envision boats of lowly immigrants emerging from the offshore mists to their refuge beneath the Statue of Liberty. More important, perhaps, was the influence of my Jewish background. I judged the matter historically: Hadn’t Stalin launched his anti-Semitic purges by denouncing Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans,” unworthy of the trust of citizenship? Hadn’t the United States welcomed Jewish émigrés? Didn’t they succeed spectacularly? What more was there to consider?

American Jewish organizations, to be sure, do little to discourage such unreflective romanticism. Thus, the American Jewish Committee justifies its 100-year long support for “generous immigration policies” and its obdurate reluctance to support the enforcement of immigration laws on the grounds that these positions are “consistent with Jewish values.” To which it might be countered: Whose Jewish values? Not, presumably, those of Samuel Gompers, the Jewish president of the American Federation of Labor. An immigrant himself, Gompers nonetheless emerged in the early decades of the last century as a leading foe of unrestricted immigration.

Plainly, the dominant ethnic narrative on immigration was suspect. But it was seeing the real-life consequences of mass immigration, including illegal immigration, that ultimately shattered my faith in its blessings.

At first glance, my home state of New Jersey may seem an unlikely vantage point from which to consider the immigration issue. But consider that of the estimated 11 to 12 million immigrants in the United States, 425,000 reside in New Jersey, no trivial fact in the country’s fifth-smallest state. Of these, a majority have arrived only in the past few years. The results, alas, bear little relation to immigrant success stories enshrined in national lore.

Examine the evidence. Hispanic street gangs like the Latin Kings and the MS-13 have prospered, their numbers swelled by the influx of illegal immigrants. Countless communities suffer from overcrowding, an ever-escalating problem in the country’s most densely populated state. State services have been stretched to the full, as illegal immigrants who pay no taxes take every advantage of the privileges afforded by one of the highest-taxed states in the nation. New Jersey hospitals, for instance, now spend $300 million a year to treat illegal immigrants. (Adding a further strain to the hospitals’ budget, many immigrants fly in relatives from their home countries to receive medical care, which American hospitals are obligated to provide, then leave the hospitals with the bill.) It was this madness, I came to realize, that the late Milton Friedman had in mind when he cautioned that “you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”

All this is bad enough. What makes the situation intolerable is that grassroots efforts from New Jersey residents to gain control of the problem have time and again met with frustration. In 2006, the town of Bound Brook, prompted by concerns about overcrowding in housing rented by Hispanic immigrants, launched a series of housing raids to address the problem. For its pains, the town was rewarded with a discrimination lawsuit from President Bush’s Department of Justice, which charged that the town was illegally targeting Hispanics. In the end, the town not only had to pay a $425,000 settlement to the illegal immigrants, but it was compelled to hire a Spanish-speaking “housing coordinator” to revise its housing and zoning laws to accommodate the lawbreakers. Nor is this an isolated incident. Consult the local newspapers, and you will find that such brazen contempt for the law has become a feature of daily life in the state.

Not to fear, open-borders enthusiasts will tell you: The problem is not immigration but assimilation. Assimilate immigrants, and you eliminate the adverse effects of immigration. Move beyond the platitudes, though, and the defect in this theory becomes immediately apparent: It wrongly assumes a national consensus about the importance of assimilation and the meaning of American citizenship. In reality, powerful immigrant lobbying organizations like the National Council of La Raza draw their strength from thwarting assimilation, ensuring thereby that succeeding generations of Hispanic immigrants will benefit from its advocacy for racial preferences, bilingual education and mass immigration from Latin American countries. Further complicating assimilation, prominent voices in the media and academic worlds preach that nationalism is an outdated notion, assuring all who will listen that the United States, rather than the product of distinctive culture, beliefs, values and institutions (the very things that Independence Day is intended to honor) is an ideological abstraction to which anyone can lay claim.

Readers will of course recognize that these arguments, and others more specious, were recently deployed to sell the country on the failed immigration bill. President Bush, in arguably his least distinguished moment, claimed that opponents of Senate’s plan to provide amnesty for illegal immigrants while doing little to enforce the border “don't want to do what’s right for America.”
“It’s a deep division not between Right and Left but between the public and the elites,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told me last month. “On one side, you have big business, big media, big philanthropy, and big government. So, how can the bill fail?” Yet, Krikorian predicted that fail it would.