Immigration Will be America’s Undoing—As It Was for the Roman Empire

The Roman Empire is certainly the prototype upon which Europe and America have built their current civilization.  “The imperial period of Rome lasted approximately 1,500 years compared to the 500 years of the Republican era,” asserts Wikipedia (see dates below).  “The first two centuries of the empire’s existence were a period of unprecedented political stability and prosperity known as the Pax Romana, or ‘Roman Peace’”.

      The survival of America and the rest of the West would do well to understand why the western arm of the Empire fell so dramatically in the fifth century when most of its moderate citizens thought it was doing just fine.  No, it wasn’t simply because of the wicked secular values such as we have today. 

      Thomas Cahill’s bestselling How the Irish Saved Civilization remains an influential history of the Fall of Rome because its prose style is popular and clear (kind of like Donald Trump) than stilted like most academic prose.  Though the second half of the book talks about the recovery of Europe thanks to Irish Christianity, the first part largely attributes the Empire’s fall to runaway immigration that few correctly assessed at the time.  

     Cahill argues that successful Roman society fatally blinded themselves to the destructive power of have-nots who surrounded the Empire on all sides.  The “Romans were overwhelmed by numbers” once the violent onslaught of the have-nots began.  It was a blitzkrieg that caught the good citizens by surprise, but it was also too late: “Despite their discipline, the Romans cannot hold back the Germanic sea.”  

      “To the Romans, the German tribes were riffraff: to the Germans, the Roman side of the river was the place to be.”  Of course, the Vandal invaders already had a Fifth Column inside the imperial city.  Like Americans and Europeans today, the Romans wanted to avoid hard work in favor of leisure and comfort.  

    The “riffraff” was lured-in “during centuries of migrations across the porous borders of the empire,” Cahill reminds us.  “More often they came in trickles: as craftsmen who sought homestead employment, as warriors who enlisted with Roman legions, as tribal chieftains who paid for land, as marauders who burned and looted and, raped and murdered.”

     The new conversion of the Romans to Christianity seems to have softened the will of the Romans to see what they were really up against, effectively disarming and blinding them in much the way political correctness does today.  Cahill makes the divide between the haves and have-nots quite explicit at one point:  

    “The nearest we can come to understanding this divide may be the southern border of the United States.  There the spit-and-polish troops are immigration police: the hordes, the Mexicans, Haitians, and other dispossessed peoples seeking illegal entry.  The barbarian migration was not perceived as a threat by Romans, simply because it was a migration—a year-in, year-out migration—and not an organized, armed assault.  It had, in fact, been going on for centuries…their principal weapon their own desperation.”