The post-Reagan era triumphantly promised a unified sense of national purpose, self-confidence, and moral clarity. Yet, what successive presidential administrations and congressional formations have delivered instead has been a gradual increase of the corrosion of the democratically spirited and trust-based American political culture. As a result, domestic politics has hardened into poisonous clannish cum tribal identities, all kinds of disagreements into hidden cum open hostilities, and fellow American citizens into caricatures to be feared or despised. Today, the United States of America as a nation is caught in the most vicious circles of mutual hatred, in which concocted outrage is feeding more outlandish hostility, conspiracy theories breeding more suspicions that lead to ever more ruthless retaliations. Simultaneously, compromise is treated as betrayal and empathy as weakness. What began in the 1980s as a celebration of the reestablishment of individual freedom and national renewal has curdled into collective isolation, leaving a nation more divided than at any point in its history.

In this national convulsion, the beginning of global migration and the resulting enormous illegal immigration are best understood not as an isolated chain of events, but as the convergence of political, economic, and cultural forces that intensified in the late 20th century. Globalization has disrupted national as well as regional economies in the so-called Third World, while integrating markets unevenly, creating sharp disparities between labor supply and opportunity. At the same time, progress in transportation and communication lessened the psychological and physical barriers to movement, transforming migration from an exceptional act into an elementary individual survival strategy. Moreover, the........

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