Would this book exist if September 11, the train bombings in London and Madrid, the attacks in Mumbai, and the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh had not happened? Probably not. All the same, I am going to argue that the acts of terrorism like September 11 only amplified the sound of a tectonic shift in global economic and social structures that has been gaining strength since World War II. That shift is currently focused, in the United States and elsewhere – especially Western Europe and Japan so far – on the questions of immigration: how much, how fast, from where… and then what? These questions, which fundamentally spring from a globalized and altogether unequal economy, have begun to replace the earlier questions of identity that marked the debate over multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Those identity questions remain of interest, but they were largely matters of single national societies, as is signaled by phrases like “Asian American,” “Native American,” “Black German,” “German Turkish,” “British Asian,” and the like. The questions of immigration are those of global structures, structures that have been imposed upon us by rampant and increasingly globalized capitalism.

Multiculturalism focused on access and integration; but these are not the primary issues of globalization and the immigration it has generated. The issue there is legitimization: whether one is, and is seen and received as, legal, legitimate, fully a citizen. The issue of multiculturalism was identity: Who are we, and who am I? The issue of immigration is integration and separation: Of what are we – am I – a part, and who decides? The issue is not what constitutes an identity that needs to be respected, but what constitutes a viable political community. It is these issues I wish to discuss, and the new structures of inequality shaping this particular moment.

Enduring Structures of Power

Before I do this, I want to reflect briefly about the successes and failures of that earlier moment of multiculturalism. It began in the demands of the Civil Rights Movement for access: access to the front of the bus, to the lunch counter, to universities and decent, desegregated schools, and above all to the voting booth.