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.
Figure 1.The U.S. is no longer a stable country. Source: Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Click on the image to enlarge.
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.
Figure 2. Psychological projection is when people unknowingly push their own
uncomfortable thoughts or feelings onto others, so they don’t have to face them directly.
Source: Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc. Click on the image to enlarge.
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.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Art Berman is Director of Labyrinth Consulting Services, Sugar Land, Texas, and a world-renowned energy consultant with expertise based on over 40 years of experience working as a petroleum geologist. Visit his website, Shattering Energy Myths: One Fact at a Time, and learn more about Art here.
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