Federalism cannot be a shield for sanctuary defiance

If Friedrich Hayek taught us to inquire about who should decide and Abraham Lincoln taught us to ask to what end, then the question of immigration compels us toward a third and inescapable question: Where is the line drawn?

The principles of subsidiarity and federalism demand that matters should be resolved at the lowest level of authority competent to manage them. Much of what the national government has usurped would be more wisely and justly managed by the states, local communities, families, and institutions of civil society.

A nation that treats its laws as optional, its borders as permeable, and its citizenship as devoid of meaning invites the very chaos that destroys liberty.

The Constitution itself was framed to embody this division of powers, preserving the vitality of local self-government against the dangers of centralized tyranny.

Yet subsidiarity is not an absolute doctrine, nor is federalism morally sovereign. America’s founders never regarded federalism as an end in itself, but as an instrument ordered toward justice, liberty, and the common good.

When the claims of federalism or local autonomy come into conflict with the equal dignity of the human person, federalism must yield. This is the profound teaching of the Civil War. That great conflict established beyond doubt that there are moral limits that no level of government — federal, state, or local — may transgress, even under the guise of divided sovereignty. The principle of human equality proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence sets a boundary that no appeal to states’ rights or local preference can override.

Before 1861, the defenders of slavery advanced an argument we hear echoing in our own day: that each state must be free to decide for itself the very foundations of republican government. The Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford lent its sanction to this view regarding slavery. But Lincoln repudiated it utterly.

He understood that the rights of man do not vary according to geography or popular vote. The self-evident truth that all men are created equal declares that no majority, no state legislature, no municipal council may lawfully decree some men unfit for liberty on grounds that deny their humanity. To enslave a man is to violate his natural rights; to nullify federal authority in matters essential to national existence is to dissolve the Union that secures those rights.

Lincoln did not abolish federalism — he preserved it by subordinating it to the higher law of nature. Federalism endures insofar as it is grounded in moral truth and serves to perpetuate a regime dedicated to equal natural rights.

This distinction becomes decisive when we turn to immigration. It concerns not merely internal policy but the very nature of the American political community: who may enter, under what conditions, and by whose authority.

The power over naturalization and the regulation of foreign entry are among the essential attributes of sovereignty, which the Constitution (Article I, Section 8) has expressly delegated to the federal government. Borders define the “We the People” whose consent forms the government. A people that cannot control its own borders or decide who can become a citizen cannot long govern itself justly or preserve equality under law, our regime’s moral foundation.

The federal government exists not to confer human dignity (which is inherent in every person) but to secure it among the specific members of the polity. Human dignity demands that no one be enslaved or deprived of life and liberty without due process; it does not entail an unqualified right to enter any political community or claim automatic citizenship.

The right to migrate is not the same as the right to enter any country of one’s choosing. Conflating the two dissolves the distinction between universal natural rights and the particular rights of citizens, a distinction the founders carefully preserved.

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The real question for us is not merely whether authority is federal or local, but whether policy is directed toward justice, human dignity, and the nation’s common good. Lincoln saw that democracy unbounded by moral limits becomes incoherent and self-destructive. A nation that treats its laws as optional, its borders as permeable, and its citizenship as devoid of meaning invites the very chaos that destroys liberty.

Federalism is a means to the end of justice; it is not a refuge from moral duty. Local communities may not, under color of autonomy (sanctuary cities), nullify the Union’s authority over matters essential to its preservation — any more than Southern states could nullify the Fugitive Slave Clause or obstruct the enforcement of laws necessary to national integrity.

These acts of interposition — driven by radical professional activists and their followers in cities like Minneapolis — echo the nullification and secession doctrines Lincoln condemned as fatal to the republic. In his 1861 Annual Message to Congress, he accurately described the true nature of such “principles”: “rebellion thus sugarcoated” that has “been drugging the public mind.”

The lesson of Lincoln and the founders is unchanging: Decentralization without moral anchors descends into anarchy; centralization without moral purpose hardens into despotism. True statesmanship orders power toward the permanent truths enunciated by the Declaration of Independence. Only then can the American experiment endure as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people — and dedicated to the Declaration’s proposition “that all men are created equal.”

Editor’s note: A version of this article was published originally at the American Mind.