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The 1965 Immigration Act abolished the racially and ethnically discriminatory national-origin quota system instituted in the 1920s. Immigration rates exploded, from roughly 70,000 a year during the quota years to about 400,000 a year by the early 1970s, 600,000 a year by the early 1980s, and over 1 million in 1989. Between 1990 and 2000, approximately 9 million immigrants arrived in the United States, more than in any other decade except the heyday of Ellis Island at the turn of the century. The sources of immigration changed as well. Whereas before 1965 the vast majority of immigrants to the United States hailed from Europe, after 1965 they came overwhelmingly from Asia and Latin America. The rise in legal migration was accompanied by an increase in illegal entries. In 1960, foreign-born residents of the United States were distributed principally as follows:

Italy 1,257,000

Germany 990,000

Canada 953,000

United Kingdom 833,000

Poland 748,000

In 2000, the distribution was as follows:

Mexico 7,841,000

China 1,391,000

Philippines 1,222,000

India 1,007,000

Cuba 952,00027

AMERICAN WORLD DOMINANCE

In January 1991, during the First Gulf War, viewers around the world watched, rapt, as the world's most powerful bombs and smartest missiles, fired from history's first stealth aircraft and guided by the world's most sophisticated satellite navigation system, took out target after target—bunkers, bridges, air defense towers, Scud missile launchers—with laser precision. For the next five weeks, U.S. Apaches, Pave Lows, Hornets, and Nighthawks pounded enemy territory, inflicting maximum destruction with a staggeringly low American fatality rate. Then, it was over: “the most awesome and well-coordinated mass raid in the history of air power.” If there was any doubt before, the breathtaking precision of Operation Desert Storm made it crystal clear: The U.S. military was light-years ahead of any other military force on the planet.28

It was not only in military might that the United States had achieved a stunning global preeminence. In the 1980s, the productive capacity that America added to what it already possessed exceeded the entire productive capacity of West Germany—Europe's largest economy. After a relatively mild recession in 1990-91, the U.S. economy exploded yet again, reaping massive gains from the microprocessing revolution and yielding “the greatest period of wealth creation in the history of the world.” While only a decade before, doubters had wondered whether U.S. business could remain competitive with Japan and a uniting Europe, by the 1990s America's economy had opened up a staggering lead over all other nations of the world. At the opening of the twenty-first century, America's gross domestic product, calculated in current dollars, represented an astonishing one-third of total world output, twice the size of Japan's and China's economies combined, and more than three times Great Britain's share of gross world output at its imperial height.

America was the country that benefited most from globalization. In the words of George Soros, an immigrant who had built a multibillion-dollar fortune in the United States from scratch, “The trend of globalization is that surplus capital is moving from the periphery countries to the center, which is the United States.” Throughout the 1990s, American corporations like Wal-Mart, Nike, McDonald's, ExxonMobil, Coca-Cola, and Disney continued to dominate the world economy, despite anti-American sentiments. The dollar was the world's dominant currency, English the dominant language, and America's the most emulated culture. As the twentieth century came to a close, with Russia in chaos, Europe stagnant, and Japan mired in recession, the United States of America had no real competition—militarily, economically, even culturally. The world had a new hyperpower.29

There were many reasons behind the United States’ sudden vault to world dominance, the most spectacular being the collapse of the