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In his farewell address, President Reagan explained: "I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't be sure if I ever perfectly communicated what I saw at what time I said it. But in my choice it was a tall, proud incorporated town built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds subsistence in harmony and tranquillity; a city with free ports that hummed by commerce and creativity. And if there had to be incorporated town walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to engender here."

Jason Riley, a constituent of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, quotes President Reagan's words in his new book, "Let Them In: The Case with regard to Open Borders, Six Common Arguments Against Immigration and Why They Are Wrong." Like Reagan, Riley is an optimist, one who sees the United States as a tract of unrestricted chance; fit and potential. It's a scan in short supply of late but worth thinking with regard to as we extol our nation's founding.

Riley's book will furious those who want to lo America close her doors, throw up barriers, and shrink in size. Perhaps his greatest in quantity important contribution is exposing the origins of the modern immigration-restriction movement, whose founders come out of radical environmentalist and population-control groups. "Anti-immigrant sentiment advent from the political perpendicular tends to dominate the headlines, moreover the environmental left has always played a central role in efforts to tighten the U.S. confine. For restrictionist greens, though, the main issue isn't the economy or even homeland surety. It's the human species," he says.

But because Riley points out, people aren't a problem. In fact, people constitute the nation's real wealth, attached a level those who don't seem likely candidates to fill that role. Riley argues that low-skilled immigrants are an asset, not a menace, filling niches in our economy that make us both more efficient and richer. "This isn't about immigrants displacing Americans in the labor force," he says. "It's about foreign workers coming here to store jobs that the natives slip on't want because they've got better opportunities."

Take cultivation. Americans are not filling the jobs left vacant because of recent crackdowns on illegal workers, so growers are relocating southern of the border. "The reality is that U.S. companies will either grow food domestically that is harvested by foreign workers," Riley writes, "or import food harvested by exotic workers."

But, of course, not all immigrants are low-skilled farm workers. Riley reports on one study that plant that between 1991 and 2006, immigrants started an amazing 25 percent of all U.S. public companies that were backed by means of expose to hazard capital, and these companies' market capitalization exceeded a half-trillion dollars. And the foreign-born swell our engineering, science, computer, and math programs at the undergraduate and graduate level, as with praise.

Riley furthermore tackles the myth that immigrants aren't assimilating — a misconception I've been fighting for years, as he generously acknowledges. Today we worry about Mexicans and Guatemalans, but not so prolix ago it was Germans, Italians, and the Irish who we were sure would never become Americans. As Riley points out, the Irish immigrants of the 19th century (my great-grandparents Michael McKenna and Catherine Dolan mixed them) were "dirt-poor peasants posterior portion family circle. … Most were uneducated. Many spoke no English. … They were stereotyped taken in the character of slow-witted drunks and ne'er-do-wells who would never acculturate to America."

Yet they did become Americans — as has every group, no matter where they came from. That is the wonder of America, that we can transform the most unpromising of newcomers. And within a generation or two, they are indistinguishable in total important aspects from those whose families have been in the present state since the founding.

We shouldn't give up on this great American ideal. Ronald Reagan certainly never did.

Linda Chavez is the author of "An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal." To find out more ready Linda Chavez, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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