Did you realize that New Hampshire is experiencing a border crisis? Neither did I, and neither did a sizable majority of my fellow New Hampshire residents. A recent survey reported in the Boston Globe, indicated that 44% of us were “not at all concerned” about our northern border and another 17% were “not very concerned.”

But Gov. Chris Sununu is very concerned about the northern border, so much so that he secured $1.4 million for a “border protection initiative” to protect those living within 25 miles of Canada. While the governor offered no specific statistics on illegal border crossings in our state, he used a spike in crossings of the border with Canada stretching from New York to Maine as the rationale to fund training, equipment and an additional 10,000 hours of patrols in that region.

Sununu was not the only Republican politician concerned about security along New Hampshire’s 58-mile-long border with Canada. As NBC’s Alan Smith reported Tuesday, several GOP candidates for president were, too. Former President Donald Trump described the U.S. border as “not so hot.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called it the site of a worsening problem. But Nikki Haley might have gone the farthest: “We will do a wall,” she told voters in Peterborough, N.H., last Saturday. “We will do any sort of border patrol that we need to have on there. Whatever it takes to keep people out that are illegal from coming in, we will do it.”

Nor does New Hampshire boast the only Republican governor spending state funds to secure part of the border. Both DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott spent millions of dollars of state funds to transport immigrants seeking asylum to Illinois, Colorado, California and New York — all states led by Democratic governors. South Dakota’s governor used nearly $1.5 million of “emergency funds” from to send National Guard troops from her state to Texas to help with border security there while her counterparts in Nebraska and Oklahoma each chipped in more than $500,000 to deploy troops from their states to the border.

Gov. Abbott has been especially aggressive in spending state money on border control. The Texas Legislature last fall passed Senate Bill 3, which earmarked $1.54 billion to construct barriers along the border, augmenting at least $1.5 billion in contracts the state had issued since September 2021 to build about 40 miles of border barrier and place hundreds of police and troops along the border. Texas lawmakers also passed a bill making entry into Texas from Mexico a state crime based on Abbott’s assertion that border control is a state function.

Acting on that premise, in October of last year, after federal agents cut some of concertina wire strung along the Rio Grande River, Texas sued the federal government, arguing the Department of Homeland Security destroyed the state’s property and interfered in Texas’ border security efforts. In a decision this week, the Supreme Court sided — barely, by a vote of 5-4 — with the federal government. They ordered Texas to allow federal border agents access to the state’s border with Mexico, effectively upholding longstanding court rulings that the Constitution gives the federal government sole responsibility for border security.

Immigration is a problem in our country, but it is not a problem states can solve by themselves. Our Constitution reflects this reality, assigning protection of borders to the federal government. In the “more perfect union” envisioned by the authors of the Constitution, Congress would pass legislation to provide the funds needed to monitor the borders to prevent illegal entry. In that “more perfect union,” there would also be sufficient funds for a U.S. tribunal to promptly and fairly determine if the basis for an immigrant seeking asylum was justified, and, if it was not, use diplomatic means to deport them.

Our country today is far from the “more perfect union” imagined by the founders and even farther removed from the later vision of our nation as welcoming the poor and huddled masses yearning to be free. We live in a country where the leading Republican candidate for president is advocating raids to round up all undocumented immigrants, proposing the construction of giant detention camps to house them and recommending mass deportations that would include many adults who have lived in this country since they were children. We live in a country where that candidate’s party is unwilling to seek a legislative solution to immigration because to do so might take away one of its most potent campaign issues. The kinds of compromises democracy is supposed to yield are nearly impossible in this environment.

As we look to the future, our political leaders should recognize that the world today is far different from that of the founders. We live in an interdependent global community. Those seeking refuge in our nation are fleeing conflicts in the Middle East, the ongoing war in Ukraine and the gang violence and narco-terrorism in Latin America. In the years ahead, as climate change creates inhospitable living conditions, we can expect more immigrants to seek asylum in countries like ours that have moderate climates. We will need to work harmoniously at a global level to find solutions.

Looking at today’s immigration crisis through this wider lens makes New Hampshire’s “border protection initiative” seem especially ill-advised. Gov. Sununu’s decision to use scarce state funds to expand policing in the North Country is no different from Abbott’s decision to spend money to place hundreds of miles of concertina wire along the Texas border and hire hundreds of troopers to monitor it. If we hope to avoid future immigration crises we will need to look more deeply into the root causes of immigration and take the steps needed to address them. Spending $1.4 million in New Hampshire or more than $3 billion in Texas to control the borders will not solve the immigration crisis.

Wayne Gersen lives in Etna.