Will the Immigration Debate Break Our Nation?

At a time of highly polarized politics, in which the fault lines among Americans follow regional and ideological lines, crowds take to the streets, preventing federal officers from seizing people of color and returning them to places they had fled far to the South. In a liberal Northern city, a well-organized group confronts US government agents aggressively and is met with violence in return.

Moralistic rhetoric dominates public discourse about these events, which touch on deep questions of national identity, citizenship, and human equality—present since the nation’s founding, but never completely settled. Taking their cues from the most militant members of their respective parties, Republican and Democratic politicians call for more radical measures and start openly questioning whether the basic unity of the United States can survive.

The above is a rough description of events in the 1850s, when abolitionist Bostonians defied federal marshals seeking to arrest black men under the Fugitive Slave Law. The political divide over slavery between a Republican North and Democratic South grew so sharp that Senator William H. Seward of New York described it in a famous 1858 speech as “the irrepressible conflict.”

But it is also a portrayal of recent history in the “sanctuary city” of Minneapolis. Protesters, considering themselves modern-day abolitionists or conductors on the Underground Railroad, have clashed with immigration and border patrol agents dispatched by the Trump administration to round up illegal immigrants. Force has been deployed against the protesters, two of whom were shot dead in January.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, having refused to cooperate with the federal crackdown, has sided with the protesters and alluded to Civil War imagery: “I mean, is this a Fort Sumter?” he told The Atlantic. “It’s an armed force that’s assaulting, that’s killing my constituents, my citizens.”

For the moment, the clash over immigration enforcement in Minneapolis has eased. President Trump withdrew federal agents in the face of a broad public reaction to the killings of protesters Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti—just as Northern resistance sometimes forced the federal government to back off from strict enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law.

However, bitter feelings and the essential policy issues remain. So too does the federal structure of the US Constitution, which provides for national authority over immigration policy but creates space for state-based noncompliance.

The optimal outcome—a compromise—is no more inevitable now than it was in the 1850s.

Will illegal immigration turn into the “irrepressible conflict” of our time? It certainly should not, and it certainly does not have to. But the optimal outcome—a compromise—is no more inevitable now than it was in the 1850s. And it won’t happen without serious effort and a real willingness on all sides to avoid disaster.

The first step is understanding just how far down the road to an 1850s-style breakdown we have already traveled. The historical analogy, though far from exact, is close enough to be instructive. And if we’re going to find our way out of this crisis, we will need all the historically informed wisdom we can get.

Seward delivered his “irrepressible conflict” speech at the end of a bitter midterm election campaign that centered on “Bleeding Kansas” and the Dred Scott decision. In depicting the country as hopelessly split between a proslavery Democratic Party, based in the South, and an antislavery Republican Party, based in the North—only the latter of which could govern in a way that was consistent with the Constitution’s true meaning—Seward’s message was first and foremost a partisan call to arms. But in its analysis, it provided a 19th-century discourse on what political scientists today might call “partisan sorting” or “partisan territorial overlap,” where geographic locations begin to align with partisan identities.

Though not nearly as total as it was in Seward’s time, partisan territorial overlap is far advanced in the contemporary United States.

It’s a particularly dangerous phenomenon for a country such as the United States, where stability depends on reconciling the passions and interests of a diverse population spread across vast territory. Though not nearly as total as it was in Seward’s time, partisan territorial overlap is far advanced in the contemporary United States. The political map consists of a sea of red, interrupted by an archipelago of blue states and cities, clustered in the Northeast, upper Midwest, and Pacific coast.

Blue and red America are increasingly not only one-party regions but also areas in which the most militant wing of the dominant party holds sway. These tendencies are likely to be reinforced by the midterm congressional redistricting efforts currently underway. President Trump initiated these in an effort to limit Democratic representation in Texas and other red states, but they could end with an offsetting near extinction for Republicans in California and elsewhere.

While one’s attitude toward illegal immigrants does not define what it means to be a Democrat or a Republican, its importance is central. And after Minneapolis, it might be growing. Some 70 percent of self-identified Democrats now support abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, whereas 81 percent of Republicans support expanding its operations, according to a recent ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll. Some bad signs: In the wake of Minneapolis, Virginia’s new governor, the ostensibly moderate Democrat Abigail Spanberger, felt compelled to issue an executive order ending state law enforcement cooperation with ICE. Republican Representative Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida is being targeted by MAGA influencers for warning the president that his policies are alienating swing voters.

This trend bodes ill for a legislative compromise on immigration, given that any foreseeable House majority would probably pass only a partisan measure and that a Senate compromise would require a bipartisan, blue-red coalition to get 60 votes. Meanwhile, Congress remains deadlocked over a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security because Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on whether, or how, to moderate ICE’s conduct.

There may be no way out of this looming impasse, but if we are going to avoid an irrepressible conflict, it may help to reflect on the substantive differences—moral, economic, and political—between the issue of slavery in the 1850s and the challenges posed by immigration now.

First, moral differences: Those escaping slavery were born in the United States, and they were fleeing a system of legally sanctioned human ownership in one section of the country to another area where that institution did not exist. In many cases they were en route to an entirely different country, Canada. Their capture meant forced return to a condition universally abhorred today (and widely abhorred then) as a fundamental violation of human rights. The migrants facing deportation today may have been fleeing poverty and repression, and it is undeniably tragic to be sent back to a place like Haiti or Cuba. But poverty and oppression are not actual bondage. And there are legal migration alternatives.

The bulk of those who are here illegally came seeking better economic opportunity—a legitimate objective, to be sure, but one that every country, the United States included, has a right to address lawfully and selectively, in its own interests. And in some cases, the migrants have indeed committed criminal offenses while in the US. Sanctuary jurisdictions such as Hennepin County, Minnesota, elide that fact by declining to help ICE detain illegal immigrants that localities themselves have jailed.

Purely financial considerations cut across the red-blue divide.

Second, economic differences: Though many sectors of the US economy—agriculture, landscaping services, and restaurants—depend heavily on illegal immigrant labor, they often have alternatives, and they are not located exclusively in one part of the country. There is no regionally distinct “illegal immigration system” that depends entirely on it, as the antebellum South depended on enslaved labor. Indeed, purely financial considerations cut across the red-blue divide. Some red districts that send MAGA Republicans to Congress have industries that require immigrant labor. Blue cities such as New York and Chicago have chafed at the cost of housing waves of border crossers during the Biden administration.

Third, political differences: The partisan political and electoral impact of illegal immigration is complex and differentiated, unlike that of slavery, which clearly inflated the South’s influence in the federal government via the Constitution’s three-fifths clause. There are an estimated 14 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. Included in the census, they help determine the size of each state’s congressional and Electoral College delegations, even though they cannot vote themselves. But the top four states for the illegal immigrant population—California, Texas, Florida, and New York—are divided between red and blue.

In short, while there is ample ground for reasonable Americans to disagree about how to deal with illegal immigration, there is no inherently “irrepressible conflict” of the kind Seward analyzed in 1858. Slavery presented a series of binary questions: legal or illegal, expanding or contained, permanent or abolished. The permanent expansion of legal slavery actually did threaten the vital interests of most Americans in the North; its containment posed similar challenges to whites in the South.

This reality, Seward argued, generated “opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become entirely a slave-holding nation or entirely a free-labor nation.” Referring to attempted fixes such as the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Missouri Compromise, and the Compromise of 1850, he argued that “the failure to apprehend this great truth” was the source of “so many unsuccessful attempts at final compromise between the slave and free States.”

Regarding illegal immigration, there is no such either-or situation. Red and blue Americans have a stake in the economic growth that a lawful flow of immigration can facilitate. They have a stake in the rule of law, which means neither a chaotic, unenforced border nor chaotic ICE sweeps through every restaurant kitchen and Home Depot. They have a stake in local cooperation with legitimate removal operations against criminals or those whom a court has already ordered out of the country. But they also don’t oppose legalizing the status of people who have been working and paying taxes here for years—who can’t all be deported en masse any more than enslaved black Americans could have been sent to Africa or the Caribbean, as some wished in the 19th century.

Seward’s logic applies to both parties in our time: Both have been captured by activist bases, donor networks, and primary electorates that reward ideological purity over negotiated outcomes.

If there is to be an irrepressible conflict over immigration today, it will have to be manufactured. Unfortunately, that can’t be ruled out. In his speech, Seward acutely analyzed how the Democrats had succumbed to ideological capture by defenders of slavery in the South, their richest and most intensely motivated faction: “A party is in one sense a joint-stock association, in which those who contribute most direct the action and management of the concern.” Seward’s logic applies to both parties in our time: Both have been captured by activist bases, donor networks, and primary electorates that reward ideological purity over negotiated outcomes.

The extremes are responsible for the volatile political stalemate in which we find ourselves now, which my AEI colleagues Yuval Levin and Ruy Teixeira aptly characterize as “politics without winners.” In 2013, Tea Party Republicans in the House scuttled a bipartisan immigration reform bill that had passed the Senate with 68 votes. After the first Trump administration tried to build a border wall and launched a deportation drive that was mild in comparison to the one the country’s witnessing now, the Democratic base was radicalized on the issue. The left gained influence over the Biden administration’s policy with the result that the southern US border was all but thrown open between 2021 and 2024. That bred Trump’s retaliatory overreach, and now Democratic activists are radicalizing in response yet again.

Graham Platner, who is running for the Democratic Senate nomination in Maine, recently urged citizens in a small coastal town, Kittery, to join “watch groups,” “rapid response teams,” and “intelligence collection networks” to guard against federal immigration agents as if they were an invading army. Meanwhile, Representative Eli Crane, a Republican from Arizona, called the events in Minnesota a “communist insurrection” and urged President Trump to use the US military to reimpose order.

Fortunately, Trump de-escalated in Minneapolis after it became clear that his policy had reached a point of diminishing political returns. The deployment of 3,000 heavily armed agents to the city had spawned a chaotic scene that unsettled mainstream voters as much as the chaotic scenes from the southern border during Joe Biden’s presidency.

The United States is reaping what it sowed over decades when the issue of illegal immigration was treated with demagoguery, hypocrisy, and benign neglect—everything but decisive, responsible leadership. The net effect was that state and federal officials tolerated or even facilitated the presence of millions of unauthorized residents. Meanwhile, many others, including both native-born citizens and legal immigrants, wondered or in some cases seethed at the evident contradictions.

The resulting corrosion of the rule of law caused millions to lose faith in the political system generally and created space for radical solutions, which, in turn, fuel the wide pendulum swings in federal policy we have seen over the past decade.

Even if the most influential factions of both parties, for their own ideological and political advantage, still peddle competing brands of radicalism, what the broad middle of the country desperately wants and needs is the rule of law. The political future will belong to leaders who muster the courage to give it to them.

Charles Lane is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on American politics, American culture, and asylum policy. He is a columnist for The Free Press.