Would Caracalla disregard our Constitution?

Take a serious look at these remarks:

In parts of the country with lots of illegal immigrants—the 24 U.S. counties that border Mexico, plus much of the rest of California—the situation is becoming debilitating. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California estimates medical costs for illegal immigrants are running about $1 billion a year in her state; with superb political instincts, she's blaming no one and simply backing a bill to reimburse state and local hospitals with federal money. I spoke recently with an administrator of a Texas hospital in a border county, and he says current rules imperil his hospital and drive him nuts. And by the way, he's not allowed to call immigrants illegal. They're undocumented.

The full economic effects are much wider. Employers who hire illegals pay them cash and thus evade employment taxes. They may also not report revenue from the work the illegals do and thus evade income taxes. Companies that compete with these employers must cut their own costs, mostly by paying their own workers (regardless of status) lower cash wages under the table, and the tax evasion spreads further.

A downward spiral begins. Government revenues decline while demand for government services goes up. The burden on taxpayers grows heavier. They respond by finding their own ways to avoid taxes or simply by leaving, making the problem even worse.

Until recently this was mostly a theoretical worry, but the recent rapid increase in illegal immigrants is making it real—and not just in border states. Latest census data show illegal immigrants increasing fast in Iowa, North Carolina, and Georgia.

I said this was big trouble for a couple of reasons. Economics was the first. The second is deeper. The situation we've created mocks American laws and ideals. It tells working, taxpaying citizens and other legal residents with Social Security numbers that they're chumps. Go to the emergency room, and if you can't pay your bill, the hospital can track you down and garnish your wages. But the illegal immigrant can't be tracked and doesn't pay the bill. You pay it, through your taxes. You dope.

What right wing nut dared say that?

Actually, it was Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor at large of FORTUNE.

Is this situation getting serious? I mean, is it possible to reach a point where there are so many immigrants that they start to destroy the integrity of a country?

As a primary theme, this blog looks at modern America from an ancient viewpoint. While ancient Rome does not offer too many lessons on the pitfalls of excessive immigration per se, a couple of points are worth considering.

Being an empire, Rome obviously had no objection to the inclusion -- even integration -- of numerous nationalities and peoples into the midst of daily Roman life. However, one thing remained sacrosanct, and that was the principle of Roman citizenship as a preferred category. Aliens were free to travel into Rome (or anywhere else) whether as slaves, traders, residents, whatever. But they did not possess the same rights as Roman citizens. This was one of the things which made Rome strong, and helped define it.

Roman citizenship carried responsibility, more or less analogous to what is called noblesse oblige today. Many historians agree that a key cause of Rome's decline was the decline in this sense of civic responsibility -- particularly military service. After 212 AD that was farmed out more and more to German tribesmen and other distant peoples -- whose loyalty to Rome was questionable. Defenses weakened accordingly, which makes sense, because how could non-Romans be entrusted with the defense of Rome? This is all the more the case when barbarian soldiers were called upon to defend Rome from other barbarians. True, some were heroes; Stilicho immediately comes to mind. But it just wasn't quite the same thing as the noble days when Romans defended their own country, and the Roman army was headed by Roman officers.

I am not arguing that this phenomenon was the sole cause of something as complex as Rome's decline, but I think it likely that psychologically, it was conducive to the decay (ironically) of classical values among the Romans themselves:

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, noted historian Edward Gibbons masterfully describes this decline of virtue:
"That public virtue which among the ancients was denominated patriotism, is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members. Such a sentiment, which had rendered the legions of the republic almost invincible, could make but a very feeble impression on the mercenary servants of a despotic prince" (1: 9).

In fairness, Gibbon doesn’t imply that such changes are irreversible and goes on to describe a time when "For a while the angry and selfish passions of the soldiers had been suspended by the enthusiasm of public virtue" (281). In reality, most of these upturns in Roman virtue were short-lived and the overall trend was away from the classical values so eloquently depicted in Virgil’s Aeneid.

The decline of Rome has been considered to include in its origin Caracalla's Constitutio Antoniniana -- which diluted the once-privileged status of Roman citizenship by conferring it to everyone in the Empire with the exception of slaves.

I found a fascinating letter reprinted in the New Left Review, which cites (a bit ominously, in my view) Caracalla's edict with approval, with historic implications for the future of the united States:

In 212 AD the Emperor Caracalla, mindful of the barbarian hordes at his borders and the growing costs of military expenditure, took the revolutionary step of declaring every freeman of the Roman Empire—from the banks of the Tigris to the Atlantic Ocean—a citizen of Rome. In a trice, the faltering superpower was reinforced by millions of new taxpayers, talents and recruits. The edifice endured for another two hundred years.

Today, does not Western civilization—in the hands of a mere 15 per cent of the world’s population and, thanks to globalization, as visible to the other 85 per cent as the contents of a Hermès shop-window in the Place Saint-Denis—demand a similarly unified power? Shared goals unite Europe and the US. We all seek to deregulate our economies, democratize our hinterlands, promote human rights. But our wealth attracts resentment and around us there surges a rising tide of the hungry and the dispossessed. Huntington’s homilies on the clash of civilizations ignore the crucial fact that the world is also divided into states. The point, for any man of action, is to ensure that ideologies and institutions coincide. Would there be an Islam today, if an Umayyad and then an Abbasid imperium had not arisen within decades of Mohammed’s death? If Damascus and Baghdad had not been political, as well as religious, capitals? Would we have a Christianity had there not been a Christendom, Carolingian or Byzantine, to hold back Arab incursions? A Mount Athos, without the ramparts of Constantinople? Cistercians, without a Frankish chivalry, Jesuits, without a Charles V?

.....

Is it just, is it democratic, that the inhabitants of the fifty states alone should vote for the American president, whose thumbs-down determines the fate not just of a couple of gladiators but of millions of lives?

The task, admittedly, would be easier if our new Augustus, relaxing on Air Force One, would scribble his reflections in French or German, as Marcus Aurelius in Greek. But the resemblance between the pioneers of the Tiber and the apprentices of the Potomac is striking: on both sides, one finds the same pragmatic refusal of abstraction, historical optimism, inaptitude for melancholy; chicanery everywhere, from the Operations Room to the marriage bed. Both offer a welcome for strangers and a respect for all gods. In both, the conquered—Latinos, Japanese—are granted citizens’ rights.

The first step is to instruct our international-law specialists to draw up a conversion plan, transforming a region of common values into one of shared sovereignty.

This sounds ominous to me, because I am a staunch believer in the United States Constitution, which so many (Americans or otherwise) would casually disregard to promote their view of a greater world good. Were it not for the Constitution, the unique freedom it secures would not be in such abundance as to be taken for granted and diluted by globalism.

Is it possible that uncontrolled immigration is a foot in the door for creeping globalization which will ultimately threaten our constitutional freedoms? I worry that things may be approaching that point. International legal precedents are openly solicited by Supreme Court justices despite the Constitution's very clear language defining it as the supreme law of the land.

Can the Constitution ever be destroyed by barbarian hordes?

Hey, don't look at me; I didn't vote for Caracalla!

(But I don't think you have to be Phyllis Schlafly or WorldNetDaily to be a little bit concerned....)


UPDATE: Emperor Misha makes me look like a limp-wristed, namby-pamby miquetoast:

By adding another 8 million cases to the already severely backlogged (to the tune of 4.5 million cases) agency formerly known as the INS, he'll ensure that people who have tried to get here legally and have followed every rule to the letter can sit around and wait for a couple of more years, all so that President Peabrain can throw in a bid for a voting bloc that wouldn't vote for him if his hair was on fire.
And those are the Emperor's mildest words. (As the old saying goes, "Read the whole thing™.")

posted by Eric on 01.07.04 at 10:09 AM





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Comments

America is Rome, just as Europe is Greece. FDR was our Julius Caesar, I think. World War I and World War II our Punic Wars. I have seen and felt these parallels ever since I re-read Spengler for the third time.
Uncontrolled immigration will be our downfall. Pim Fortuyn, that great statesmen of Holland, a homosexual (androsexual) man, who favored legalized drugs, women's rights, and other freedoms, was a libertarian, a libertine as he was often called, a true liberal in the historic sense, was forced to be conservative in the true sense, in order to _conserve_ his country's heritage of freedom. He warned against the influx into his country of Muslims who did not share his values, who thought women should be veiled and homosexuals should be stoned to death. He was called a "fascist" and murdered for daring to speak the truth. With his death and in his death the battle lines were drawn.
He remembered all too well what became of Dutch freedom half a century before when a similar horde of immigrants, these speaking German, but whose ideology much more resembled that of those Muslims than his own, demanded entry into Holland. See "The Diary of Anne Frank" for details.

Steven Malcolm Anderson   ·  January 7, 2004 01:48 PM

Steven, I share your admiration of Pim Fortuyn -- who was murdered for that worst of all political offenses: having the effrontery to think outside the conventional spectrum while simultanously running for office. His election would have been utterly terrifying to the thugs of the "right-versus-left" charade (who hold onto power through a desperate but deadly con game).

Eric Scheie   ·  January 7, 2004 05:13 PM

Our constitution has been increasingly ignored for generations, and nowadays is openly flouted: look at the Supremes upholding that patently unconstitutional campaign finance reform. You cannot blame such things on immigration. I don't think that immigration, by itself, and even on a large scale, would entail the risks you mention, if America still believed in itself the way it did a century ago.

Alan Sullivan   ·  January 7, 2004 06:58 PM

Thank you, Eric.
Alan Sullivan is partly right. An America that believes in itself will screen, ideologically profile, both those who wish to enter here and all Supreme Court nominees for their loyalty to our Constitution. Let no more Muhammad Attas into our country, and don't allow any more Borks or Scalias to be considered for the Supreme Court or any other judicial position.

Speaking of the Supreme Court, that article on its (or O'Connor's) willingness to rely on international law was disturbing. We must preserve our sovereignty, that is for sure.
However, I have one quibble with that with regard to Lawrence and Garner vs. Texas. In the 1987, bad, decision, Bowers vs. Hardwick, Chief Justice Burger tried to justify "sodomy" laws by saying that homosexuality was and always had been regarded as immoral throughout _Western_, not just American, culture. Therefore, in reversing that ruling, Justice Kennedy had to draw upon the legal experience of other Western countries to show that homosexuality is _not_ universally condemned, that the West as a whole, the Western way of life, recognizes individual rights to be sacred, including for homosexuals. He also drew upon the Constitutions of various states in our own country which recognize the right to privacy. Actually, the choice is not whether our laws on such issues as "sodomy" will be like those of other nations, but rather _which_ other nations will they resemble, other Free nations like Holland, or Slave nations like Saudi Arabia.
We are at War, and the War abroad is only same War as the War at home, reproduced on another level:
http://www.upwithbeauty.org/2004/01/03#WarMap

Steven Malcolm Anderson   ·  January 8, 2004 03:02 AM

Um, if I'm "partly right," which part is wrong? You didn't explain, and I'm curious.

Alan Sullivan   ·  January 8, 2004 08:03 AM

Thanks Alan and Steven,

I know that the Constitution "has been increasingly ignored for generations, and nowadays is openly flouted." That's why I am increasingly worried. And while I don't blame this on immigration, I do think that the pressure to ignore the Constitution can only increase when millions of citizens with no appreciation or understanding of the Constitution (and with no demonstrated knowledge thereof) are added to the population.

You're right that immigration alone is not the problem. But a wide-open border would quickly reduce this country to a meaningless hodgepodge of people with vastly different ideas about freedom of speech, religion, restraints on law enforcement, etc. -- and little time to learn. Bear in mind that I did not condemn all immigration; I only posed as a question whether it might be going too far.

"If America still believed in itself the way it did a century ago...."

If only!

One last thing, Steven. International law cuts both ways; plenty of foreign countries still prohibit sodomy, and I suppose an "enlightened" Islamic court might maintain the way of the Shariah is the way of the future. Our own jurisprudence furnished plenty of precedent for knocking out the medieval sodomy statutes. I would prefer to see the US as leading the way towards freedom rather than following "international trends."

(Burger's Hardwick analysis, by the way, referred to sodomy as "a capital crime under Roman law" -- except he quite disingenuously cited Theod. 9.7.6 and Code Just. 9.9.31. Theodosius's statute prohibited male prostitution, while the Byzantine Emperor Justinian's sodomy laws were promulgated at the instigation of his wife Theodora for use against political enemies, and criticized widely at the time. Rome by that time was in a state of collapse and the Dark Ages were soon to follow.)

Eric Scheie   ·  January 8, 2004 11:03 AM

Eric, I know several recent immigrants. They are more passionate and knowledgeable about America than most born citizens. I would be cautious about assuming that people don't come here to better themselves.

Alan Sullivan   ·  January 8, 2004 07:06 PM

Once again, I am not condemning all immigration, nor would I make assumptions about all immigrants. And where did you get the idea that I think people don't come here to better themselves?

Eric Scheie   ·  January 8, 2004 09:34 PM

Dear Eric: Excellent points. I agree wholeheartedly that we must lead, not follow. It would have been better to have relied solely on our own Constitutional tradition. I would also have preferred to have done that in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) instead of relying on gun-hating Swedish socialist Gunnar Myrdal's research on the psychological effects of segregation. That decision was attacked all over when I was growing up, and by the same people. Funny how today's critics of the Supreme Court use identical arguments but clam up about that one. Afraid of being called racists? Gets in the way of Jesse Helms being palsy-walsy with Vernon Robinson?
My point was that we are, culturally (not politically) a part of Europe, of the West. And the homo-haters would have attacked the Court anyway even if it had used solely native sources: "Us 'murricans don't wanna be like them fag-loving Frogs." Nope, they'd rather be like good ol' 'murrican Saudi Arabia instead.

Steven Malcolm Anderson   ·  January 12, 2004 03:17 PM

If today's immigrants were not mainly hostile to our freedoms, they would not put their children in public school at the expense of the net taxpayer, which is aggression in the case of those who are on net public subsidy. With a median personal income of $15k a year, and very few with above average personal incomes or not having at least one child in public school, 1980's and more recent immigrants are overwhelmingly plunderers like the hordes which destroyed Rome. Their eligibility for affirmative action in such large degree allows for further massive pillaging. They are schooled in anti-caucasian propaganda, and told they are the vanguard of a decolonization of the majority. There is further economic damage from the displacement of productivity-enhancing investment by inexhaustible supplies of low-wage unskilled poulations. The racialization of politics and culture has proceeded to the point that one should not expect immigrants to go outside their blocs. It is not the majority, but power-greedy political elements, who get something from this process.

john s bolton   ·  April 26, 2004 04:53 AM


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