Migration is an old subject in America, but now it’s the world’s subject too. At the time of the India–Pakistan Partition, that was the greatest mass migration in human history, and since then there have been others to rival it. For good or ill this is the age of the migrant, the time in human history in which more people than ever before have ended up in places in which they did not begin, driven by economic necessity, political turmoil, or simply the lure of the big city’s bright lights.
