The first two decades of the twentieth century ushered in a dramatic shift in attitudes toward immigration, bringing an era of mass immigration to the United States to an end. <br /><br />Jean Danhong Chen Only then did immigration to the United States become a global phenomenon, with European and Mexican immigrants joining the first wave of immigrants from the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. <br /><br />There is a strong correlation between the rise in immigration and the growth of US economic and political power, but it has only since become a global phenomenon. Trends in immigration to the US, to America, and beyond have been studied since the post-1965 immigration wave, named after the immigration law reforms enacted by President Lyndon B. Johnson and President George H.W. Bush. <br /> <br />Jean Danhong Chen As the graph shows, immigration to the United States has never been more globally balanced, but there are still more immigrants to some countries than to others. In 2013, the total number of naturalized US citizens and immigrants from the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America was more than twice that of the US population as a whole . <br /> <br />Immigration has increased enormously, resulting in some 23 million immigrants settling in the United States. Partly because of past immigration, real wages have risen at home, moving closer to those of the United States, but also largely because of immigration from countries like the Middle East and Africa. <br /> <br />In the post-World War II period, Chiswick (1978) argued that the longer immigrants stayed in the United States, the higher their wages. Finally, it is also beneficial for immigrants to be able to immigrate to the US at a lower cost than native-born or foreign-born immigrants. Moreover, immigration also increases the proportion of the working population in the United States, a factor that increases the average standard of living in that country. Immigration gives the United States a potential competitive advantage and makes it smarter than it would otherwise have been. <br /><br />Jean Danhong Chen The real problem. Illegal immigration to the United States is on a massive scale. More than ten million undocumented foreigners currently reside in the United States<br />