Living in Texas is like parenting a teenager. Any time you tell them they can’t do an obviously bad thing, they threaten to leave. Case in point, the recent talk about secession over illegal immigration.

Now, Texas loves to talk about secession almost as much as it loves to tell other states their chili sucks. There has never been a moment in my life when someone in the state wasn’t advocating leaving the union and utterly lying about the legal right to do so. These days they call it Texit, which just goes to show you how little people know about the difference between the European Union and the United States.

Governor Greg Abbott has continually painted Texas as having to step up and secure the southern border because the Biden Administration has torn down all the walls and set up a migrant FastPass. It doesn’t matter that this is absolutely not true and that Biden has done far more to curb illegal immigration than Abbott. It feels true to people who want an excuse to wave guns and pretend they’re the heroes.

One of those is Daniel Miller, a longtime leader in the secessionist movement. In January he claimed the only way to secure the border was to secede, likely sparked by the U.S. Supreme Court telling Abbott he can’t build razor wire barriers.

This is absolute clown shoes.

Let’s say that Texas actually does secede, either from a public vote or by the order of the state government. That action is illegal, and the United States would have to use military force to stop it. Texas contains a great deal of the nation’s space infrastructure, 15 active military bases, and one of the most important ports. There is no scenario where the federal government lets any of that go.

Speaking of ports, the state does not have a navy. I know it’s the dream of every gun-totin’ Texan that we could stand off the entire U.S. Army with a few rifles and an overinflated sense of our own toughness, but the only weaponized thing we have that floats is our bullshit.

Texans couldn’t even organize a pro-Trump boat parade on Lake Travis without sinking a flotilla to the bottom. We are not going to be able to stand up to a navy that has a quarter of the world’s aircraft carriers. The U.S. doesn't even have to fire a shot. Simply blockading the Gulf of Mexico would cripple Texas within a matter of weeks.

On top of that, Texas would suddenly be on the hook to handle the entire border infrastructure. The current Biden proposal for money to spend on the southern border is $25 billion, about one-sixth of Texas’s entire yearly budget.

Maybe the state could handle that, but remember that secession would more than quadruple the total Texas border since it would now include New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Much of that border is in barren, desolate areas without any fencing at all. Trying to secure it while presumably holding off the hostile forces of the largest army in the world would crater the Texas economy so hard the dinosaur fossils would wake up and declare it “a bit much.”

Don’t forget that the whole time this is happening, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are gone. Millions of Texas will lose income, so spending goes down. We’ve already established international trade will sink thanks to the naval blockade. Within a few months of secession Texas would be too poor to afford drugs that would even let us hallucinate that we were handling illegal immigration better than the federal government.

Since launching the $11 billion boondoggle that is Operation Lone Star, Abbott has proven that he has no plan for curbing illegal immigration that doesn’t involve throwing as many brown people in jail as he can or shipping them to other cities. Well, our prisons are at capacity. I suppose we could use the 18 empty federal prisons in Texas (expect the federal government to release everyone), but we have to staff and maintain them.

As for shipping them to Democratically controlled cities, it’s hard to see the United States putting up with that once Texas secedes. The federal government already moves huge numbers out of the state in order to keep local processing centers from being overwhelmed. If Texas leaves, they have no reason to bother. Thousands of migrants who would have otherwise gone elsewhere are now staying here.

“Just deport them back to Mexico!” What makes you think the Mexican government is going to take them? Most of them aren’t Mexican, and they have no reason to accept them. There is no reality where the Mexican government sides with Texas over the United States and is willing to risk damaging that relationship by helping an upstart state where broke people will be eating each other within months. In all likelihood, Mexico is going to be a hostile nation to the new country of Texas, leaving us completely isolated.

The idea that we can just police state our way out of the migrant surge is the dumbest thing in the dumbest year of our lives. Abbott’s military fashion show has actually increased illegal border crossings where Operation Lone Star has been most active. Being a tremendous dick to immigrants might make some people happier, but it’s never actually works to solve the problem. Secession would escalate our current failure into here-to unknown dimensions of disaster.