The title of the article at Telegraph.co.uk is, “Immigration Destroyed the Roman Empire. Now it could bring down Europe,” and truer words have seldom been written. A recent meme has noted that men think about the Roman Empire more than women would suspect. Could it be that these thinking men, are tuning in, maybe at the unconscious level, to the seemingly relentless undermining of Western civilisation, and they are thinking of Rome to see how the Great Collapse will play out? The Telegram article could have referred to the leading scholarly book on this theme, but did not. Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe (2012), which shows that immigration of the so-called Germanic barbarian led to a rapid decline in Roman social cohesion, which with declining economic conditions, pushed Rome over the edge. But, the Nordic seeds were laid for the foundations of Europe. This is not going to happen a second time round, and all indications are that it will be a fall, but not a rebirth, on the present mass immigration agenda.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/20/immigration-roman-empire-europe-collapse/

“It seems that social media has unearthed yet another dirty secret about the common male: they think about the Roman Empire far more than the fairer sex ever dreamed. With more than 10,000 migrants arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa in a single week – a figure which dwarfs the island’s resident population of 6,000 – it’s not just men who are beginning to feel as though we’re living through the Fall of Rome 2.0. While the Romans were swamped by barbaric German hordes, ageing modern Europe might be sunk by too many millions of people seeking to participate in the high living standards and guaranteed incomes afforded by the European system.

Does the comparison hold water? In some obvious senses, no. The barbarians who invaded Rome were often armed to the teeth, while most modern migrants, thankfully, arrive as supplicants. But in other senses, the comparison is more apt than one might think. 

The Germans were able to achieve military victory because they were less centralised: by training every man for war, small tribes could raise larger armies than a Roman province. Roman professional armies represented a tiny fraction of the Roman population, but could only be maintained via an exorbitant and oppressive tax system. In the end, many Romans concluded that civilisation was simply not worth the price they were being asked to pay for it.

Ever since the days of St. Augustine (the other Augustine – he of Hippo), the Romans had a nagging feeling that their civilisation was falling at least in part because it had endured a sea change in culture. While Christianity would go on to become a major humanising force in the world down to the present day, early Christianity was often applied with such new-convert zeal in Rome that ruling elites were no longer sure what it was that they were defending. 

The Christian elites of the late 300s were happy to remove the Altar of Victory from the Senate floor, and to see the Pagan texts burned to ashes at Alexandria. But once that was done, what was the justification for maintaining an empire founded on Pagan bravado?

Many of us have the uneasy feeling that today’s woke revolution, with its loathing for the Enlightenment, and the Liberal values that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution and modern democracy, has all the earmarks of a cultural sea change similar to that experienced by the later Roman empire.

The fact that modern political elites seem so out of touch with the public also calls to mind worrying parallels with late Rome. Our modern bureaucracies seem content to run society on autopilot no matter who is voted into office, and no matter the will of the people who vote them in. Meanwhile tax burdens increase, and the sense that we are getting something valuable for our contributions to the public purse seems to diminish yearly.

The root of our modern immigration problem lies at the intersection of demography and institutions. In 1950, the population of Europe was about 550 million, while the population of Africa was 220 million. Today, the population of Europe is 750 million, while Africa’s surges towards 1.5 billion. The Middle East has witnessed similar levels of population growth in recent decades. This is no one’s fault: Europe’s population went through a similar ballooning phase 100 years ago and it’s simply what happens when modern medicine and technology are introduced to a society. In the long run, the populations of Africa and the Middle East will plateau, just like Europe’s did. But in the short run, this will put enormous pressure on Europe’s ability to cope.

While we cannot control demography, institutions and policy offer a little more hope, at least in theory. The European Union was cemented during the neoliberal euphoria of the later 1980s and 90s, before the demographic changes south and east of Europe became quite so apparent. In hindsight, it seems ridiculous that a country would sign away its ability to police its borders, at the same time that it was effectively required to provide lifelong healthcare and welfare benefits to anyone who managed to claw their way ashore – and their extended family besides. 

Given the fact that the lands south and east of the EU have decades to go before their GDPs reach European levels, it behoves us to give our immigration policies a good hard think.

But if, as Douglas Murray and others have warned, woke bureaucrats continue to see this as a question of knuckle-dragging racism and xenophobia rather than what it truly is – a question of living standards and the inescapable practicality of shared values for ordering a society – then it is only a matter of time before our own populations decide that the price we pay for civilisation simply isn’t worth it anymore.”