Border tensions reflect conflicting visions of what US should look like

The current strife along the southern border of the United States is a conflict between two visions of America. Both of these visions have a long history. Neither will triumph fully over the other.

On one side of the conflict, Texas Governor Greg Abbott demands a closed border to refugees coming from Mexico, Central America, and other southern regions. He wants to preserve resources, privileges and security for long-standing residents of the United States. Abbott and his Republicans supporters see immigrants as threats to a familiar (but fading) white Christian America.

On the other side of the conflict, President Joe Biden advocates for a more diverse and inclusive country, one that treats refugees with dignity and opens its doors carefully but consistently to those seeking opportunity.

For Biden and his Democratic supporters, immigrants fill critical job vacancies (from nursing to computer engineering), they enrich the culture of the United States, and they affirm American ideals of freedom and tolerance. If Abbott wants to be free from newcomers, Biden wants them to help make the United States become more free.

This standoff replays a debate that goes back to the American founding, when, in 1798, the Federalists, led by President John Adams, passed a series of Alien and Sedition Acts to keep immigrants, especially of French origin, from emigrating to the new country.

The Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, accused the Federalists of violating the Constitution and the principles of the American Revolution. For the next century, American border policies batted between these poles.

In 1924, the United States passed a federal immigration act that created quotas to restrict entry to the country for people from "undesirable" regions, including those targeted by Abbott today. New legislation in 1965 eliminated the quotas and allowed in a much more diverse pool of immigrants including from India, but it emphasised family connections, employment needs and educational opportunities.

Border restrictions remained in place for many destitute, uneducated refugees fleeing to the United States in search of opportunity. In the 1970s and 1980s, the US's Cold War communist adversaries locked their people inside their countries; the United States continued to lock many people out.

Abbott therefore has a long tradition of exclusion to draw upon as he demands a closed border and takes measures into his own hands. He has placed deadly obstructions, including barbed wire fences and giant buoys, in the way of exhausted migrants trying to reach American land.

He has blocked federal forces from managing the border area, even as they try to rescue drowning families. And, most recently, he has signed legislation enabling state police to arrest immigrants for crossing into Texas. Abbott has essentially asserted his personal control over the international border.

The governor can do this for a while, but not for very long. The federal government has clear jurisdiction at the border based on the US Constitution, historical precedent, and its accumulation of power. The Supreme Court has recently affirmed federal jurisdiction.

There are 15 large federal military bases in Texas, and they are more than capable of overrunning state forces with little resistance.

Biden also has the power, invoked by many previous presidents, to take control of state military reserves and other forces known as the National Guard. Unlike in the Civil War, state leaders lack any serious and sustainable source of separation. Secession from the US is simply not an option.

Abbott knows this. Like the state leaders who resisted civil rights a half century ago, he is using his doomed attacks on federal power to show his voters that he is committed to their vision of a white Christian America, even as he cannot defend it.

He is making himself into a martyr, and he is evoking sympathy from those who see the country the way he does. The federal government, and Biden in particular, will control the future of the border, but not the minds of those Americans who feel threatened by the refugees who continue to enter the United States.

The obvious solution to this division is new legislation that provides a legal and managed pathway for more immigrants to become Americans, but also limits the pace and distribution of the newcomers around the country. This is what Biden and many Republicans, including Senator Marco Rubio, have proposed.

It will not happen soon, however, because the restrictive vision of a white Christian America, closed to newcomers, remains compelling for frightened citizens who fear an invasion is coming. It is an attractive script for political demagogues, like Abbott, who want to exploit fear for their own purposes.

Although the governor of Texas will have to back down from his resistance to federal control of the border, he will continue to agitate against immigrants, exaggerating their threat and exploiting their precarity through harassment and stigmatisation. He will continue to use racism as a motivator for his voters.

The conflict at the border will only end when most Americans reject these views. Paradoxically, this would require more immigrants to enter the country and become citizens and voters. That is, of course, the Republicans’ gravest nightmare.

Federal authority at the border will ensure that day arrives, but it is coming slowly, and not without more pain and suffering, especially for those families seeking a better life.