The Trump administration is planning to halt immigration processing at airports in sanctuary cities.

The permanent things are not permanent by accident. What is being proposed here violates the canon that social order is a living inheritance, not a mechanical arrangement to be adjusted by the whim of the moment. To halt immigration processing at airports in sanctuary cities is to treat the complex web of federal and local authority as a switch to be flipped, rather than as a delicate ecosystem of mutual obligations that has taken centuries to cultivate. It is an act of administrative impatience, born of the belief that the state can solve the problem of human movement by severing the ties that bind the center to the periphery.

We must look first to the nature of the sanctuary city itself. To the ideologue, it is a rebellion against federal law; to the conservative, it is a manifestation of the locality’s right to define its own character within the broader union. The small community, the parish, the town council - these are the actual sites where human life is lived and where virtue is formed. When a city chooses to limit its cooperation with federal enforcement, it is not necessarily acting out of malice, but out of a specific, local understanding of order and hospitality. To punish this choice by halting the processing of millions of tourists is to confuse the symptom with the disease. It is to treat the local variation as a cancer to be excised, rather than as a tissue that, while perhaps inflamed, still serves a function in the body politic.

The stakes here are not merely political; they are civilisational. The FIFA event brings together people from every corner of the globe, the universal human desire for connection and competition. To disrupt this flow because of a dispute between Washington and a handful of municipalities is to prioritize administrative uniformity over the organic flow of human interaction. It is a triumph of the planner’s mind over the poet’s heart. The planner sees a grid to be controlled; the poet sees a tapestry to be tended. When we halt processing, we are not enforcing order; we are creating chaos. We are telling the world that the United States is a place where the rules change not because of principle, but because of political scorekeeping.

This is the danger of ideology, whether it comes from the left or the right. The progressive ideology seeks to dissolve borders in the name of universal brotherhood; the authoritarian ideology seeks to harden them in the name of national purity. Both are destructive because both reduce the complex reality of human migration to a single principle. The conservative position is neither. It recognizes that borders are necessary for the preservation of culture, but it also recognizes that hospitality is a virtue that must be practiced within those borders. To punish a city for its hospitality, even if that hospitality is misguided, is to punish the virtue itself. It is to say that the local community has no right to interpret the law in light of its own circumstances.

The Trump administration’s plan is a classic example of the permanent revolution in reverse. It seeks to impose a new order by destroying the old forms of local autonomy. But order cannot be imposed from above; it must grow from below. The sanctuary city is a flawed institution, perhaps, but it is a real one. It has roots in the soil of American localism. To uproot it by halting airport processing is to tear down a cathedral to build a car park. The car park may be more efficient, but it has no soul. It offers no shelter from the storm, no place for prayer, no memory of the past.

We must ask ourselves what kind of society we wish to be. Is it one where the federal government holds a monopoly on truth and order, punishing any deviation with economic and administrative sanctions? Or is it one where the local community retains the right to define its own character, even if that definition is sometimes at odds with the center? The latter is difficult, messy, and often frustrating. But it is the only way to preserve the freedom that makes America great. The former is clean, efficient, and orderly. But it is the order of the graveyard.

The permanent things require our attention, not our force. Justice is not served by halting the processing of tourists. Beauty is not preserved by turning airports into battlegrounds. Truth is not revealed by punishing cities for their dissent. What is revealed is a deep anxiety in the soul of the nation, a fear that the center cannot hold. But the center does not hold by force; it holds by consent, by tradition, by the shared belief that we are part of something larger than ourselves. To abandon that belief is to abandon conservatism itself. We must tend the garden, not burn it down.