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

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

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 ma...

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