Visigoth and Syrian refugees and other thoughts about walls

I've been reading The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians by the eminent Roman, Byzantine, and early medieval historian J.B. Bury, published in 1928. Maybe Obama and Merkel should read a little ancient history. They would discover that, when wars spring up in the East, are allowed to blaze out of control, and send waves of foreign refugees flooding into Europe, serious consequences, including the downfalls of great empires, can ensue.

The [Visigoths] were seized by panic and firmly believed that there was no safety for them [from the invading Huns] north of the Danube. They determined to withdraw southward beyond that river and seek the shelter of the Roman Empire. This was a very critical decision: it led to events which determined the course of the history of the Roman Empire. Accordingly they sent an ambassador to the Emperor Valens, who was then staying at Antioch, beseeching him to allow the nation to cross the river and grant them lands in the provinces of the Balkan peninsula. It was the year 376. In the meantime their families abandoned their homes and encamped along the shores of the lower Danube, ready to cross the moment the Romans permitted them. The situation was highly embarrassing for the Emperor and his government. It was unique: they had no experience to guide them in dealing with it. It was pressing; some decision must be come to immediately; there was no time for ripe deliberation. The opinion of ministers and councillors was naturally divided, but it was finally decided to accede to the request of the Goths and to receive them as new subjects on Roman soil. The decision was reached with much hesitation and only after many searchings of heart; but we may be certain that the Emperor and his advisers did not in the least realise or imagine the difficulties of the task to which their consent committed them. To settle peacefully within their borders a nation of perhaps 80,000 or more barbarians was a problem which could be solved only by most careful organisation requiring long preparation. In recent times Europe has had some experience of the enormous difficulties of dealing with crowds of refugees, and of the elaborate organisation which is necessary. Take, for instance, the case of the thousands of Asiatic Greeks who fled from the Turks and sought refuge in European Greece. [Bury refers here to the expulsion of Anatolian Greeks from the Turkish mainland that took place, roughly, in the years 1914 to 1922.] Here it was simply a case of affording food and shelter to people of the same race, but it taxed the whole resources of the Greek Government to solve it. The problem that met Valens was vastly different and more difficult. Quite suddenly, without any time for thinking out the problem or for any preparation, he was called on to admit into his dominions a foreign nation, of barbarous habits, armed and warlike, conscious of their national unity: to provide them with food, and to find them habitations. The Roman state was highly organised, but naturally there was no organisation to deal with an abnormal demand of this kind, which could not have been anticipated. As might have been expected, when the barbarians crossed the river and encamped in Lower Moesia (Bulgaria) all kinds of difficulties and deplorable incidents occurred. The military and civil officials were quite unequal to coping with the situation, and no wonder. War was the result, a war lasting nearly two years and culminating in A.D. 378 in the great battle of Hadrianople, which is one of the landmarks of history.

Bury, J. B.. The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians (Kindle Locations 575-597). Albion Press. Kindle Edition.

As Wikipedia observes, the battle of Hadrianople "is often considered the start of the process which led to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century."

The scenes are all too familiar. Visigoth refugees huddle on the northern banks of the Danube, fleeing the onslaught of the Huns behind them and longing to reach the opposite southern shore, controlled by the "humane" Romans. In our own day, Syrian refugees huddle on the shores of the Mediterranean in Turkey, fleeing the onslaught of ISIS behind them and longing to reach a Greek island or the European mainland across the water. Officials are confused about what to do. Should the refugees be admitted? Their plight is heart-wrenching. But in language, culture, and religion they are vastly different from the local residents who will be forced to take them in. Also, they come from a place where warfare is a way of life and they are habituated to the ways of violence. Finally, the decision is made to admit them. They flood in. "All kinds of difficulties and deplorable incidents" ensue. Eventually, the refugees become alienated from their hosts and turn against them (as we have seen in France, in its capital Paris and just yesterday in Nice). An act of humanitarianism on behalf of the refugees ends up undermining the stability of the very government that welcomed the refugees in.

This is by no means an argument in favor of not taking refugees in. Rather, it is simply a statement of how complicated the situation can become and how unintended consequences can result from the best of intentions. One is forced at least to acknowledge that, when one reflects on the fact that the Roman emperors could have continued to use the Danube as a barrier to keep the Visigoths out, thereby possibly preserving their Empire, that the Roman emperor Hadrian constructed the wall named after him to separate Romans from barbarians in Northern England, and that the Chinese constructed the Great Wall to stem the raids and invasions of the various nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppe, maybe Donald Trump's proposal to build a wall or other kind of barrier across our southern border to prevent illegal Mexican migrants from flooding into our nation doesn't sound so hare-brained after all.