One of my favorite writers is Cullen Murphy. Former editor of the Wilson Quarterly, then the Atlantic, he now is an editor at large for Vanity Fair. What endears him to me, though, is the fact that for a quarter of a century he scripted, and his father drew, the Prince Valiant comic strip. Murphy’s training was as a medievalist and he knows his history. With regard to the current immigration debate he has some interesting things to say.
Immigration restrictionists often make a facile comparison between the United States and the Roman Empire in its late stages. Rome, so the argument goes, failed to secure its borders and allowed the influx of barbarian peoples who undermined the integrity of the Roman state and brought about its collapse. As Murphy points out, this neat account hardly corresponds with the historical reality.
Rome, Murphy notes, was a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual society. Its borders were indistinct and highly permeable. What is more, they served as dynamic regions where strong cultural interchange took place transforming both the Roman and the barbarian populations. They were crucibles, not lines in the sand.
And it’s the same with us, for all the vigilantes grimly uncoiling barbed wire in the desert. What does “border” even mean? Global communications and electronic capital flows have brought borders into the fourth, fifth and nth dimensions. Hadrian’s Wall today would have to be supplemented by Hadrian’s Firewall.
American borders aren’t quite where the map shows them, anyway. For national security purposes, they extend to the docks of Rotterdam and Hong Kong and as high as satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Some borders have simply disappeared. Consider the transnational revolution wrought by the ATM machine. For corporations, borders are a figure of speech.
What is far more important than the borders is the fact that Rome was a gigantic assimilation machine, turning outsiders into insiders.
The U.S., too, is an assimilation machine, though one whose efficiency we tend to doubt in the present, and to acknowledge only in hindsight. Looking back, we now know that the U.S. managed to accommodate the huge waves of immigration in the 1850s, the 1880s, the first decade of the 1900s and the 1980s — despite skepticism at each of those moments that it ever could. Every age doubts that it retains the absorptive capacity of ages past, just as every age fails to remember the human heartache and wrenching adjustments that past immigration entailed.
And all of this suggests to Murphy that we are learning false lessons from the Rome/America analogy.
In the end, the example of Rome suggests that the most effective long-term stance toward the outside lies less in building walls than in strengthening the foundation of our own society — bolstering not just such tangible structures as education and healthcare and a government free of corruption but also intangible values such as equality, the entrepreneurial spirit and the principles of access and opportunity. If we take care of this, much else will take care of itself.
Murphy is right, at least as regards his understanding of ancient Rome, and I think he has got the current situation just about right. What is important is not maintaining the borders, but strengthening the mechanisms of assimilation within the US itself. We should not be wasting our time building fences. Instead we should be building a stronger society.
Read Murphy’s editorial here.
The title, cited by Murphy, is a phonetic representation of the Pledge of Allegiance. It comes from cards handed out at naturalization ceremonies.
