Decline and fall I

George Santayana famously said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Or something like that.

But those who study the past are condemned to keep their mouths shut about any "lessons learned from history," at least when writing for professors and peer-reviewed journals. It's understandable. You have to demonstrate competence in understanding the past on its own terms and for its own sake before you can jump into the deep water of application.

But this blog is not peer-reviewed!

So I will say that it's been fun reading Norman Cantor's Civilization of the Middle Ages while watching the far right's war against comprehensive immigration reform sublimate into conspiratorial mutterings about the new President's birth certificate. Rome fell because of illegal immigration--that's what the barbarian invasions were! Why they even had a "guest worker program"--Goths in the Imperial Guard, and look where it got them!

On the other hand...

Cantor argues that Rome did not fall so much as, like the Cheshire Cat, it gradually disappeared. Plague decimated the late Western Roman Empire, leaving vacant land and making the entire region poorer. Nature abhors a vacuum, so in came the barbarians, drawn by Roman culture, consumer goods and available land, and driven west by other victorious barbarian tribes. Attila the Hun struck fear in the hearts of the entire civilized world, but you'd hate to tangle with the Mongolian warlord who sent him and his people west in the first place.

Cantor estimates that the Empire would have needed an army of five million men to secure the entire border. No mean number considering that the entire Empire topped off at fifty million. The U.S. put that percentage of its population in uniform during World War II, but it would be nearly impossible to do that on an indefinite basis. The Romans withdrew to secure bases, conceded territory that wasn't worth saving, and conserved their military assets for the biggest threats. That meant protecting the urbanized, wealthy East from the Persians rather than holding the Franks back from the swamps and forests of Gaul.

The Romans would allow barbarians to settle within the Empire, in exchange for their policing the border against their cousins. But the Romans dealt duplicitously with their Germanic guests, and the guests revolted. They didn't want to destroy Rome; the wanted a slice of the pie, but prejudice and corruption made conflict inevitable and in the end Roman and barbarian inadvertently killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

Human migration is a fixture of world history, and will continue to be so until there are no more great disparities in the wealth of nations, and the last chapter is written on man's inhumanity to man. Poverty and perfidy south of the border will ensure a steady stream of men, women and children headed north, and we can no more secure our southern border than the Romans could. (We could, I suppose, but at a cost that we, like they, weren't willing to pay).

What we need to do is manage the inevitable flow better. There needs to be generous opportunities for those who want to come here to do so legally, and they need to enjoy equality under the law once they arrive here.