Journal of Transnational American Studies

Immigration is a tense political topic in virtually every Western country, and in many others as well. In fact, immigration is an international issue: 3 percent of the world's population, 191,000,000 people, now live in countries other than those in which they were born. This paper discusses why immigration is so fraught, the relation of the crisis over immigration to the growing fracture of the Western world's economy, as well as to terrorism like September 11 and the train bombings in Madrid, Mumbai, and London, and how these factors—growing economic disparity, immigration, and terrorism—have altered one of the basic cultural phenomena of the United States in the last three decades, namely, what we call multiculturalism.