ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights a few of the most obvious of the economic, demographic, and cultural transformations impacts in the hopes of helping to show that the migration story is, ultimately, not just about migrants but about all of us. Migration and multiculturalism are bringing about genuine cultural change, and change can be challenging and often destabilizing, bringing both benefits but also certain costs and consequences. The reason that immigration is often so controversial in political culture is less about migrants themselves than it is about the changes, both real and perceived, intentional, and unintentional, that they bring in the countries they are moving to and those from which they are departing. In the United States and Western Europe, the backlash to immigration and multiculturalism more generally has focused more around issues of culture and religion and in particular anti-Muslim sentiment, which have ramped up in the post-9/11 era.
