Every immigrant faces a tragic choice: Stay who you were and stand apart, or morph into something alien to join in.

This country, in its wisdom, offers the immigrant an uncommonly generous deal: be a hyphenated American.

I was born in Cuba. At some unremarked moment, I became a Cuban-American. That means, roughly, a U.S. citizen with access to really good food and really loud conversations. I could feel proud of the people I came from and still love the country I have grown old in.

My parents were scrupulously law-abiding, and made sure I was a legal immigrant. Back then, all the immigrants I knew had entered this country legally—many of them, like my family, had escaped Communist oppression. Dreamers and desperadoes have always snuck across the border, but the numbers were rarely significant, and many of them were arrested and sent back to their country of origin. Deportation wasn’t a display of bigotry. It was the law. If you wanted a share of American freedom and prosperity, you had to play by the process. Barack Obama, apostle of hope and change, deported over 3 million illegal migrants—more than any president before or since. That was his duty: to enforce federal law.

So, I watched the videos of the Los Angeles immigration riots in a state of utter perplexity. Who were those angry, violent people? Were they really illegal migrants who wished to stay in the United States? In that case, why did they wave the flags of the countries to which they were apparently desperate never to return? Why didn’t they say, “I will abide by whatever rules you wish, so long as you give me a chance to live here”? Or, as many conservatives insist, were the riots the work of organized leftist groups?...