Tales of the flood.

Unguarded Gates: A History of America's Immigration Crisis, by Otis L. Graham Jr. (Rowman & Littlefield, 264 pp., $26.95)

RADICALS loose in America. Unprecedented numbers of immigrants arriving, from countries less and less like those that founded the United States. A flooded labor market, with wages dropping for low-income Americans. Industrialists clamoring for more cheap foreign labor. Does all this sound familiar? It could be a description of today's reality, in which terrorists menace our country; masses of Third World immigrants continue to swamp our shores, displacing American workers in many job sectors; and industrialists cheerlead for the importation of even more foreign workers. In Unguarded Gates, however, historian Otis L. Graham Jr. shows that this would have been equally accurate as a description of another time of large-scale immigration: the period spanning the 1880s to the 1920s.

Graham, professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, divides the history of American immigration policy and practice into three eras. First, states and, increasingly, Congress dealt piecemeal with who arrived, and decided who could stay, in the absence of an overriding national policy. Second, the Great Wave of the late 1800s and early 1900s culminated in adoption of a comprehensive policy designed to regulate the volume and character of the immigrant flow. Third, rising liberalism loosed a Second Great Wave, which continues--and increases--today.

Graham shows that Americans, from the beginning of the republic, have been ambivalent toward immigration. Colonies and, later, states disqualified foreign paupers and criminals. Thomas Jefferson counseled that the "inconveniences" associated with immigrants be weighed against the benefits they would bring. Alexander Hamilton agreed with Jefferson, saying immigrants' "heterogeneous compound" would "change and corrupt the national spirit." Graham notes that the Founders, in the interest of preserving the integrity of the republic they had struggled to create, opted against an immigration policy that would be constantly destabilizing: They expected mostly native-born increase, with the immigrants who did arrive becoming Americans in outlook and attachment.

The 19th century saw the beginnings of a flow of immigrants increasingly unlike the Americans already here. Western European nations that sent settlers to America "in the 17th to 19th centuries had been early and advanced incubators of constitutional democracy, religious pluralism (within a Christian framework), and unprecedented progress in science, technology, and economic development. By contrast, Great Wave arrivals were from nations or regions within the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires that by Western standards were profoundly backward."

Thus came restriction. Despite being a product of the Progressive Era, which in many ways broke with the Founding period, the new policy of restriction was profoundly conservative. The national-origins quota system was an exercise of republican self-government, reflecting a fair-minded, honest assessment of mass immigration's costs and benefits. The Great Wave had fed social upheaval, in the form of surplus labor, packed cities, unsanitary conditions, and cholera; it had also stretched social services. Alien anarchists could even pose a threat to ordered liberty--a fact brought home to Americans when President McKinley was assassinated by an immigrant. Mass immigration's most serious effect, however, was felt in the pocketbook--by, among others, blacks, whose interests in this regard were defended by Booker T. Washington. Led by mainstream restrictionists such as Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and Samuel Gompers, Americans coalesced behind a system for controlling and reducing immigration, which would, in Lodge's words, "treat all races alike on the basis of their actual proportion of the existing population."

Graham performs a valuable service in refuting modern-day charges that racist motivations and eugenicist theories underlay the Progressives' moves to restrict immigration. Over the last half-century, well-meaning revisionist historians--seeking to "indict racism ... down the full sweep and side eddies of the American past"--aimed modern values at "ripe targets among the immigration restrictionists"; as a result, textbooks have presented an unbalanced perspective on early immigration reform. To be sure, bigoted elements fringed the movement, but mainstream restrictionists repudiated these extremists. As Graham points out, America in the 1920s possessed "a strong dose of what we call American Ideals--essential human equality, fairness to all, social tolerance." Most Americans--including the elites--believed deeply in these virtues and principles; this fueled the Americanization movement that Graham discusses and John J. Miller's The Unmaking of Americans (1998) covers in depth.

The 40 years following restriction vastly aided assimilation and helped solve economic, social, and political problems arising from Great Wave immigration. Today, America faces similar problems as a result of the post-1965 Second Great Wave--but, as Graham demonstrates, political correctness has undermined our national self-confidence and, in turn, stifled discussion of what to do about immigration. Today's cosmopolitan elites were steeped in the immigration-reform-equals-xenophobia version of history; to them, even post-9/11, open immigration remains a "symbol." To condemn any criticism of it is "a shorthand way of demonstrating commitment to anti-racism and internationalism," and of distinguishing the educated classes from the lower orders, who are well known to harbor a "bigoted preference for cultural homogeneity."

Unguarded Gates is especially enlightening in its analysis of the vast cultural rift between the elites, who benefit economically from cheap immigrant labor, and average Americans, who bear the costs and consequences of the present mass immigration. The book assembles hard facts detailing how the Second Great Wave causes economic disparities, hurts the poorest Americans, risks permanently splintering our society, and presents new national-security threats. In short, Graham dispels myths that distort our understanding of one of today's most pressing issues. He seeks to disarm immigration enthusiasts of the vicious epithets with which they close down honest, open debate. This book sets the stage for fair discussion, as America again approaches the bursting point from uncontrolled immigration.

Mr. Edwards is an adjunct fellow with the Hudson Institute, and coauthor of The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform.