Republicans have fired a barrage of rhetorical blanks on the issue of illegal immigration. Relishing President Biden’s struggles to secure the border and listening over-intently to their base, GOP politicians concluded that border security offered a choice line of attack against the current administration. But in last Fall’s midterms, immigration scarcely registered as a priority for the vast majority of swing voters. Sensing a wedge issue, Republicans came up with few votes that would not have ordinarily, and emphatically, have come their way.

The issue of immigration has always been fundamental to the politics of the American nation-state. America is, with critical exceptions, a nation comprised of immigrants. And controversies over which foreign nationals to accept as entrants into the national community have wracked the nation since George Washington’s famous speech declaring America a refuge for the world’s oppressed.

Our immigration politics have not always been edifying. The very right of the federal government to deport foreign nationals was established in the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, which President John Adams signed during a xenophobic hysteria against French-Americans. A century later, President Chester A. Arthur reluctantly signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting immigration from China and even revoking the citizenship of Chinese immigrants who had been naturalized as Americans. In one sense, US immigration history is a story of the majority group grasping for a self-definition and erecting legal and social barriers to the permeation of that line.

The current Republican obsession with illegal immigration stems from this process of exclusion. Immigration to the United States has all too often been understood as friction between racial groups, and anxiety about the browning of America lies at the heart of conservative rage toward irregular migration. Many of the most anti-immigrant politicians represent long-homogeneous states that have recently begun to see an influx of nonwhite immigration. For example, restrictionist Tom Cotton’s Arkansas erupted in fury when a few thousand Cuban refugees were relocated to the state during Bill Clinton’s governorship.

In North Carolina, culture shock has landed with resounding force. Native-born Tar Heels had not historically shared “their” state with new immigrants; for example, in 1930, only 0.3% of North Carolinians were foreign-born. But late-20th-century trends rapidly upended this sleepy status quo. Hundreds of thousands of foreign migrants came to the state in the 2000s–66% percent of them without papers. This sudden shock to the cultural settlement ignited a backlash against foreigners that continues to conservative politics in the state.

In other word,s immigration triggers the central anxiety of native-born conservatives–that a homogenizing “melting pot” will give way to a “salad bow” of diversity. Cultural discomfort is a deeply disconcerting sensation,. And an impassioned urge to restore the entrenched Anglo hegemony of centuries past has trickled out to a more diffuse white resentment, reaching the point at which white catholics, descendants of immigrants derided as “micks” and “wops,” voted for the most xenophobic president since the 1920s. Eighty-one percent of immigrants to American today are nonwhite. A “nationalism” favored by so many conservatives can, in this light, only be labeled White.