Driving to work this morning, Michael Smerconish was taking calls from listeners about immigration and the border crisis. I was half listening - I stayed up until midnight last night catching up on homework I didn't realize was due (because who assigns homework over Spring Break?) - and a woman called in and started talking about some list Smerconish had of problems in the U.S. (maybe that was it, I can't be arsed to find it on his website), and all of them coming down to critical thinking skills.
And, yeah? A lot of problems probably are the result of critical thinking skills. Go on....
But then.... THEN she started going on about how Tucker Carlson said that the Roman Empire fell because there were too many immigrants and they all joined the army and then mutinied from within and that was why the Roman Empire fell.
Immigrants were not the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire.
Actual Causes:
• Corrupt politicians(emperors) more interested in power than actual governance
• A whole host of economic issues including a slow down of expansion (Rome relied heavily on taxation from all of it's conquered territories), inflation and the debasement of currency, agricultural decline, trade decline, increased taxation, and increased government spending on military campaigns, public works and a lot on nonsense.
• The size of the Empire - it was just too big and too hard to defend.
• Germanic invasions - which is where the "Immigrants" come in. Germanic tribes entered the empire looking for land and resources and were rejected - so they attacked towns and took what they needed to survive.
The sound byte of "immigrants caused the fall of the Roman Empire" sounds sensational - and any sensational sounds byte really needs to be followed up with research because it's entirely too easy to boil down a complex topic to an entirely oversimplified and inaccurate tidbit. Tucker Carlson in particular is notorious for this - and that garbage being repeated by someone lauding the importance of critical thinking skills is especially enraging for me.
Also, please don't come at me for also boiling down causes to a few sentences - I'm not a historian and I'm very tired.