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Politicians flounder and demagogues huff and puff over
this “unprecedented” immigration pressure. In fact, it all more or less
happened 1,640 years ago, on Europe’s—that is, the Roman Empire’s—troubled
border.
From Brexit
Britain to Calais’ Jungle to Donald Trump’s fantastical border wall,
anxiety over refugee and immigrant influxes is at
peak pitch. The Obama administration earned scorn from Republicans
for recently announcing plans to admit
110,000 refugees in fiscal 2017, nearly 30 percent more than
its 2016 quota, though still far fewer than the numbers of mostly Soviet
bloc and Cuban refugees arriving in the peak Carter-Reagan years.
Politicians
flounder and demagogues huff and puff over
this “unprecedented” immigration pressure. In fact, it
all more or less happened 1,640 years ago, on Europe’s—that is, the
Roman Empire’s—troubled border. In 376 A.D. the empire underwent
a self-inflicted ordeal that seems eerily prescient today, setting off
a chain of events that would lead to the sack of Rome itself. The
cause, students learn, was a series of barbarian invasions. But as
the contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus and other
chroniclers tell it, Rome’s downfall actually began as a refugee crisis.
The Romans were
hardly novices at resettling refugees and other immigrants. Theirs was the
world’s longest-running multi-ethnic, multinational society, the most
diverse and successful ever seen—at least until the rise of our republic.
For seven centuries, Rome grew by assimilating immigrants and conquered
peoples. They provided much-needed labor: settlers in underpopulated
territories, farmers to feed the empire’s cities and armies, and
especially, soldiers to fight its wars. For all, there was a path to Roman
citizenship, the universal elixir. Finally,
Emperor Caracalla granted citizenship to every freeborn resident.
Roman
assimilation failed, however, when Hun warriors—as feared in their day as ISIS
is today—swept into Europe from the east. The
Huns overran some Germanic Goth tribes and drove others west and south
to the imperial border.
Men, women and children—200,000 by
contemporary accounts, somewhat fewer by modern estimates—massed across
the Danube River, begging for asylum. The Eastern emperor Valens, who
reigned in Constantinople while his Western counterpart ruled in Italy,
welcomed one main Gothic tribe, the Tervingi (later called Visigoths) on
highly favorable terms.
Usually when
Rome accepted barbarians, it dispersed them in small groups to speed
assimilation and keep them from forming rebellious critical masses. But
the emperor and most of his army were off warring against a rival Iranian
empire. Valens didn’t have enough troops on site to supervise a dispersal,
and he was eager to receive more German soldiers for his army. So he
granted the Tervingi permission to stay together and choose where they
wished to settle. Their grateful chief, Fritigern, offered to convert to
Christianity.
This streamlined
plan never reached fruition. Rome’s vaunted logistical capacity crashed
against the sheer number of hungry refugees and the venality of its own
officials; their arrogance and incompetence could have been a playbook for
the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Bremer occupation of Iraq. The Roman
garrisons herded the Tervingi into camps that became death traps. Corrupt
local officials siphoned off what food was sent. At the same time,
they refused to let the Goths leave the camps to buy food.
Starving refugees reportedly sold their own children into slavery for dog
meat, one child for a dog. Local commanders bullied and menaced the
Goth chiefs, in one case even murdering their attendants.
Desperate and
outraged, the Tervingi rebelled, some wielding weapons that the
overwhelmed border guards had failed to confiscate and others whatever
clubs they could improvise. Another Gothic group, the Greuthungi (a.k.a.
Ostrogoths), whom the Romans had denied entry, now poured across the
river. Slaves, miners, prisoners and German soldiers already serving under
Rome likewise rose up. Valens sent his army back from the Levant to put
down the uprising and eventually returned to lead it. He begged for aid
from his co-emperor in the West.
Finally, two
years after fleeing across the Danube, the Goths met the imperial army at Adrianapole, where Turkey,
Greece and Bulgaria now meet. Fritigern offered peace for land; Valens
refused. The Goths won a crushing victory, slaying most of the Roman
troops and Valens himself. They had established themselves as an
independent power inside the empire. In 410, they sacked Rome itself.
Both sides in
today’s debates might find confirmation here. Look what happens when you
open the doors, the immigration-averse can say. Those who see immigration
as a source of strength and refuge as an obligation might draw opposite
conclusions: Rome ultimately couldn’t keep the Goths out; those it barred
eventually crossed the Danube anyway. Its downfall shows what happens
when, instead of accommodating and assimilating refugees, you isolate and
abuse them.
Eric Scigliano’s
books include Seeing the Elephant: The Ties that
Bind Elephants and Humans and Michelangelo’s Mountain.
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