Immigration is a Mirror of National Disintegration
Illegal immigration, wrote Matthew Continetti, is “the focal point of our age. And it has the potential to break the nation apart.”
Not because of its scale—unauthorized immigration has remained relatively stable for years—but because of what it evokes: fear, identity, sovereignty, and the sense that the center may no longer hold. It has become a symbolic flashpoint, exposing deeper fractures in the national psyche and the political system.
Los Angeles was the latest eruption. After federal raids swept through Latino neighborhoods, protests escalated into chaos. Cars burned. Police were overwhelmed. Trump responded with force—deploying 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 marines. For the administration, it was a matter of law and order. For California Governor Gavin Newsom, it was something else entirely: an act of provocation masquerading as governance. His televised rebuke wasn’t just for Californians—it was a national warning about executive overreach. In the vacuum left by a fractured Democratic Party, Newsom is positioning himself as more than a governor—perhaps the face of a renewed resistance.
David French titled his recent New York Times column “America Is No Longer a Stable Country.” The instability he describes doesn’t stem from unrest itself, but from a federal response that’s performative, provocative, and intent on sidelining state authority—less about restoring order than recasting who holds it.
But the LA unrest wasn’t an endpoint. It was another act in a deeper constitutional and cultural drama. Illegal immigration doesn’t just raise policy questions—it forces a confrontation with more primal ones: Who belongs? What holds a nation together? What do borders mean in an age of unraveling cohesion?
At a surface level, the immigration debate is a tug-of-war between state and federal power. But beneath that lies an ideological fault line. Progressives champion federal authority on climate, healthcare, and tech regulation, but resist it when applied to immigration enforcement. Conservatives call out this inconsistency and use it to frame immigration not as a policy issue, but as a battle over sovereignty and survival. For Trump and the right, immigration becomes the canvas on which broader fears about disorder, dilution, and decline are painted—especially when social unrest brings those anxieties to life.
Yet the scale of the actual problem often falls short of its perceived urgency. Pew Research puts the unauthorized immigrant population at 11 million in 2022, down from a 2007 peak of 12.2 million. The trend has been mostly flat. But public perception tells a different story—one of invasion, crisis, and collapse. The numbers may not support it, but the emotions do. This isn’t simply a data problem—it’s a psychological one.
Projection helps explain the disconnect. In times of disruption—economic, technological, or cultural—societies look for something to blame. The “illegal immigrant” becomes the perfect vessel: a visible, often voiceless other onto which the anxieties of a changing world can be projected. As Joseph Campbell might say, the immigrant becomes the archetype—the outsider, the boundary-crosser, the challenger of the known order.
This projection offers clarity where there is none. The true crisis—economic fragility, unraveling social bonds, eroding institutions—is shapeless, abstract, and difficult to face. The immigrant, by contrast, is visible. Graspable. A body to blame. And so immigration stops being about people crossing borders and becomes a vessel for everything else we can’t name.
But the consequences are real. Anti-immigrant rhetoric and hardline policies create a feedback loop: fear justifies force, force deepens division, division confirms the original fear. The cycle feeds on itself. Marginalized communities become more alienated. The national mood becomes more brittle. And the promise of coherence through control gives way to deeper fragmentation.
This is not just poor governance—it’s the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: mistaking abstractions for reality, symbols for causes. It’s the belief that order can be restored by force, that political theater is policy, that fear projected onto others can resolve the deeper instability within. And yet, the fear is real. As Alfred North Whitehead might put it, these are “psychological facts”—real in their impact, even if not in their origin.
The immigration debate, then, is not really about who crosses the border. It’s about whether there’s still a border at all—between order and chaos, identity and dissolution, past and future. It’s a referendum not just on immigration policy but on national coherence itself. And in that sense, it reveals far more about the internal condition of the country than about those arriving at its edges.
Like Art's Work?
Share this Post:
Read More Posts
You are right in pointing out that this is a world wide problem. I do think that there are other historical social factors that are being ignored one being that particularly affects the US, Australia and even the UK. That is in the 18th-19th centuries both in the US and Australia the land was taken from the original inhabitants by force and this historical knowledge feeds the fear that someone else is going to come in and take it from “us”. In the UK the Anglo-Saxons came in and again took the land by force in what is now England in the 5th-6th centuries and later Wales became it’s first” colony”. Debby Banham of Cambridge University wrote an interesting paper in 1994 “Anglo-Saxon attitudes: in search of the origins of English racism’, European Review of History2.
Thanks, J, for your thoughts and the reference.
I’ve always found our attitudes toward strangers and outsiders to be one of the most difficult parts of human behavior to understand.
All the best,
Art
A timely article!
‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ as I believe Michael Bloomberg once said.
Part of the current angst appears to be that RECENT immigration hasn’t been either measured (Pew’s figures don’t reflect the last 2 1/2 years) or ‘managed’ in the sense of controlled in any sensible way.
Europe faces a similar challenge.
It has suited the powers-that-be in both continents to allow this situation to develop, for a variety of good and bad reasons.
Thanks, Ian. I agree.
All the best,
Art
Art, thank you for the thoughtful comment on problem of immigration and borders. Homo sapiens is woefully inept at forecasting the future. The rapid increase in the world population, the unequal distribution of resources and wealth has resulted in magnet countries which become the goal for many of those who suffer from poverty, lack of freedom and opportunity outside of the magnet countries. The magnet countries are mostly ageing populations and will likely need immigrants to avoid declining living standards. We do not yet know how AI will alter the requirement for immigrants or how it will change living standards. In the US, immigrants find and do work that others will not do. The undocumented are employed by corporations, companies and individuals who are not punished under existing law because it has been convenient/profitable for both the undocumented and the employers. The magnet countries have reached the “push the lifeboats off and do not let them land” stage of their history but are uncertain how and when to do this. We need more thoughtful, informed discussion and negotiation to seek out a pragmatic, flexible and forward-looking policy to avoid the fear and chaos of the present.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments, Conrad.
All the best,
Art
This point is correct – “ Not because of its scale—unauthorized immigration has remained relatively stable for years—but because of what it evokes: fear, identity, sovereignty”
So first the USA and its NATO allies destroy countries through war (Libya, Iraq, Syria etc) and sanctions and economic war (Venezuela, Cuba Iran and far too many others) then it’s says to those desperately poor people you cannot come here! We destroyed the Mexican economy through Clintons NAFTA and wonder why they want to come here.
So who stokes this fear of “the other” – the media and the elite in both parties. Obama was the “deporter in chief” and Biden tried to pass the GOPs border bill. Those at the top want to divide us over petty issues to prevent us from seeing the billionaires enriching themselves at our expense.
Ellis Island processed 10,000 immigrants a day in the early 1900s – and not one computer. We can easily do that today. Jeremy Grantham and others are warning of the coming problem of our aging population. We need these people – that should be obvious for many reasons.
The immigration laws were changed in 1924 to keep out Jews and Italians. We have seen this fear and disinformation before too many times in our history
And LAPD “overwhelmed” – not on CNN, you must be watching FOX?
Philip,
I don’t watch Fox.
With respect, I think you’re taking a narrow, US-centric view of this. Immigration is global issue of our time. This isn’t just unrest—it’s a crack in the foundations of the global order that markets still pretend is stable.
All the best,
Art
“it reveals far more about the internal condition of the country than about those arriving at its edges”
Indeed!
And that condition elected Donald Trump, a reflection of a long process of increasing inequality, barely surpressed racism and widespread resentment of educated elite success. In a way Trump is evidence of the failure of American governance. Too bad that failure is causing so many people to take out their fears and frustrations on immigrants.
As someone who has lived in a recently-indigenous culture (during Peace Corps service), a multi-cultural country in the Middle-East (Lebanon) and, in recent decades, the most ethnically diverse state in the US (Hawaii) and as someone who loved all of those experiences of cultural diversity, it is strange to realize that a totally unwarranted fear of cultural difference is destroying the United States. But in a democracy the people get the government they deserve. That the US is getting Donald Trump says all you need to know about the majority of the electorate and their predilections. Hillary Clinton described them best: deplorable.
The only silver lining in this shit-show is that it is likely to crash the US economy and perhaps even the global economy, something that had to happen sooner or later anyway. We can rejoice in that even we mourn the US slide into martial law and dictatorship. If we can somehow avoid a nuclear war during the coming economic disintegration, a much more habitable world will be left for our descendents than would otherwise be the case. That’s about the only good that will come out of this. It’s not much, but it’s something.
Joe,
This is a global problem as I think you understand. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. Complexity is why civilizations fall and that’s what’s happening. Tainter’s definition of “collapse” is loss of complexity so that’s another dimension to consider because that’s not how most people think about it.
All the best,
Art
Hey Art
In a zero sum economy, for these people to be fed, housed and clothed, it means someone else has to forgo those things. Surely it’s that simple?
Regard
Wayne
Wayne,
Nothing is “that simple.”
All the best,
Art
Climate Change driven massive migration will overwhelm conventional controls. Will crude, blind violence, fueled by the demons of hate, become the norm across the planet?
“a multi-cultural country in the Middle-East (Lebanon)” – and how has that turned out? Civil war and a destroyed failed state with a terrorist organization controlling huge swaths of the country. Not the multi-cultural success story you imply but very much like what we are seeing on the streets of LA. Immigration is not the problem – a porous open border with uncontrolled illegal immigration is the problem.
A couple of points:
Lebanon did have a bad civil war along ethnic lines, like there been many ethnic conflicts around the world throughout history. Correlation may or may not indicate causation, but it’s hard to tease out the primary causes of conflict when there are so many, also including economic and population pressures, territorial conquest for resources and class or caste factors. All I know is that when a multi-ethnic population is at peace, it’s very enjoyable to live there.
The streets of LA were just fine until the Trump mass deportation sweeps began. LA has had a huge immigrant population (legal and illegal) for a long time with no problem. The most recent real riots in LA (1992 and 1965) had nothing to do with immigrants.
Joe,
I don’t share the level of public alarm over immigration—that’s part of what drove me to look more deeply into the issue. Like your time in Lebanon, my perspective is shaped by living in Houston, the most diverse city in the U.S., and in a neighborhood even more so.
Trump may have contributed to the situation in LA, but that’s beside the point. What matters is that immigration, rightly or wrongly, has become one of the defining public concerns of our time.
All the best,
Art
A very good, succinct, and wise perspective you share here, Art. Thank you!
Thanks for your comment, David.
All the best,
Art