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The most important immigration story of all The West doesn't share the same fate as Rome

Immigrants on the Arizona (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Immigrants on the Arizona (Mario Tama/Getty Images)


March 12, 2024   6 mins

“Barbarians at the gates.” That is the phrase has become inextricably associated with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, a description and an explanation. It conjures up an image something like Thomas Cole’s “Destruction” painting from his Course of Empire series. The sky a maelstrom of darkening clouds, classical architecture wreathed in fire — and barbarian hordes marauding through the streets. But, while a popular-historical meme, it nonetheless descends from a genuine reality.

Because immigration played no small part in the demise of Rome. The period from the late-4th century to the mid-6th is frequently even termed “the Migration Period” or, in the more thunderous German, the Völkerwanderung. That long century was shaped the new ethnic groups that moved into the Empire from central and eastern Europe, spurred on by an initial exodus of population from the Eurasian steppe. The exact causes of this exodus — climate change, overpopulation, the building of the Great Wall of China — are ceaselessly debated by historians. But by 500 AD, with Anglo-Saxons north of the Channel, and Vandals, Franks, Goths further south, the vast majority of the ex-imperial landmass was ruled by newly arrived dynasts and warrior groupings.

For some modern commentators, however — from Boris Johnson to Pat Buchanan — the history does not stop there, and there is an immediate modern parallel. If, they argue, the United States and its Western allies represent something like a new empire, it too is threatened with invasion by incoming migrant hordes. And they see these hordes most visibly in the vast migration of peoples currently taking place across America’s southern border with Mexico, and through the Mediterranean world from North Africa.

But, while the historical comparison between Rome and the West has an attractive simplicity, there are fundamental disanalogies. Rome’s economy was overwhelmingly agricultural, and steady-state. Its GDP could not increase in anything but the very long term, since the stock of good land was fixed and farming methods slow to improve. Therefore the establishment of the Western successor states necessitated the partial or sometimes total (as in southern Britain) confiscations of wealth-generating agricultural assets from their existing owners to support their new rulers. In other words, migrants did literally and materially displace the Romans.

In comparison, wealth generation in the West — which is neither steady-state nor agricultural — has become effectively dependent on flows of migrant labour. Since 1900, average family sizes have declined dramatically across the developed world: currently only Iceland and Israel are producing the canonical 2.1 average children per adult female for the current population to reproduce itself in the next generation. Everywhere else, birth rates are below this level and in some cases — particularly Germany, Hungary, and Japan — far below. Therefore, immigrants aren’t appropriating wealth from the West, but supplementing a shortfall in the productive workforce. Which is why every 1% increase in legal migrant numbers — and the overwhelming majority of migrants into the west do arrive legally — adds an average 2% to GDP in Western countries, and average unemployment rates have not increased despite all the recent population inflows.

But, if we expand the discussion of modern migration to include its non-Western dimensions, a different comparison with Rome offers another, much more compelling parallel. Because the obsessive media coverage of Mexico and the Mediterranean refugee crises actually elides the most important modern migration story of them all. Apart from those arriving in the West, many times more people (countless millions in fact) have been on the move within the developing world. It is this new age of migration, the largest movement of people in the entirety of human history, which poses the real challenge to continued Western economic prosperity.

It began as a by-product of colonial-era economic development in the 19th century. As the rapidly industrialising West’s demand for raw materials from its colonial territories grew, as well as for foodstuffs for its expanding urban populations, new networks of connection grew up across the different empires: based on ports, internal river systems, and, eventually, railways. Former subsistence peasant producers across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and South America found themselves sucked into these networks in ever-increasing numbers to provide the labour for new cash crops, raw material production, and to establish and run the transport networks.

The process only accelerated under the newly independent governments of ex-imperial territories in the years after 1945. Many devoted considerable resources to basic education, attempting to create homegrown industrial bases to fend off expensive imports from their former masters. And this sucked people in massive numbers from continental interiors to congregate in coastal cities such as Shenzhen, São Paolo, Lagos, and Mumbai. Once there, better healthcare and a plentiful food supply added exponential population growth into the mix.

In economic terms, these import replacement strategies enjoyed only limited success, and largely failed after the oil price shocks of the Seventies. But what this astonishing flow of humanity did achieve was to put in place a ready-made labour force across different parts of the developing world for the Eighties, when Western countries lifted their long-standing capital controls. As the West deindustrialised, investment began flowing outwards to the developing world, where labour was so much cheaper, with the aim of returning Western corporations — and hence the West as a whole — to post-war levels of growth.  

This worked, for a time. But over subsequent decades, Western investment has combined with the emergence of new classes of indigenous entrepreneurs to generate a global shift in the geographical location of manufactured wealth production. Since 1947, for instance, the population of Bangalore has increased from 700,000 to about 14 million, the vast majority supported by manufacturing jobs, while India’s national literacy rate has risen from about 20% to 75%. Over the same period, by contrast, London’s population has stayed more or less the same and it has ceased to be a major manufacturing centre. This second Völkerwanderung had created such a cost-effective labour force that it proved overwhelmingly logical, as globalisation gathered momentum, to relocate a huge percentage of global industrial production away from the West’s old manufacturing centres to the teeming new coastal metropoles of the developing world.

The process is irreversible, and far from complete. Public attention focuses on China and the other Bric countries, but seven of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies are now African. Kenya, for example, is still mostly famous for its tea and game reserves. But it currently enjoys an annual growth rate of over 7% and Nairobi has become a digital finance hub. And it is in examining the peripheries of the Western world’s old empires, that the comparison with Late Antiquity achieves a new resonance. Imperial systems first come into existence with the purpose of enriching the population at the imperial centre. But over the longer term, they unintentionally kickstart revolutionary processes of economic and hence socio-political change around their fringes, and eventually the emergence of new entities capable of challenging the Empire’s continued dominance.

“The process is irreversible, and far from complete.”

In the Roman case, 400 years of sustained economic demand for foodstuffs and other raw materials from across the Rhine and the Danube generated a discernible agricultural revolution. By the end of it, barbarians could support themselves in large enough numbers to swarm in on the eve of the Empire’s collapse. Over the same time frame, diplomatic subsidies and the fostering of apparent allies simultaneously produced larger and more coherent political superstructures at the head of these populations. In the 5th century, therefore, the ancient Roman West was carved up by immigrant-warrior groups whose greater size and coherence were the direct result of centuries of coexistence with imperial power. And this is where our own real parallels with Roman history lie. The old global dominance of the modern West is now being challenged by new actors whose growing economic strength — the foundation of their emerging political clout — is the end result of development processes that were originally set in motion to further Western interests.

The outcome of Rome’s imperial lifecycle was always likely to be dismemberment. The outcome for the modern West need not be so catastrophic. There will be enormous political challenges: in Ukraine and the developing sabre rattling over Taiwan new actors are already testing the actual strength and moral resolve of the old Western Empire, and no doubt there are other tests to come. But the vast majority of the developing modern periphery is showing not the slightest desire (or indeed need) to invade the old imperial core in search of greater wealth.

There are other difficulties to overcome — not least pollution and climate change — but the stock of wealth-generating assets is not so limited, and, in principle, there can be sufficient economic growth to satisfy the rest of the world’s legitimate demands for a reasonable share of global GDP, while preserving plenty of wealth for the West. The outcome of the modern Volkerwanderung need not be so much the end the end of Empire, but a diffusion in the distribution of global wealth, Western hegemony fading with a whimper, not a bang.


Peter Heather holds the Chair in Medieval History at Kings College London. His most recent books include Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion and, co-written with John Rapley, Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West


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Right-Wing Hippie
Right-Wing Hippie
9 months ago

Which is why every 1% increase in legal migrant numbers — and the overwhelming majority of migrants into the west do arrive legally — adds an average 2% to GDP in Western countries
These numbers are rather unclear. One percent increase in which legal migrant numbers? The number of migrants arriving in the west as a whole, or per country? Because if it’s the latter, then that makes no sense. Australia’s average yearly issuance of permanent visas is about 92,000; their GDP is $1.5 trillion. America’s average yearly issuance of permanent visas is about 1 million; our GDP is $28 trillion. So Australia admitting just an additional 920 immigrants would increase their GDP by $30 billion, a net increase of $32.6 million per immigrant (hard workers, I guess!), while if the United States admitted an additional 10,000 immigrants our GDP would increase by $560 billion, or $56 million per immigrant. Does anyone regurgitating these numbers actually bother to think about what they represent?
average unemployment rates have not increased despite all the recent population inflows.
Have they gone down? Because if they haven’t, then, if the native-born population is not replacing itself as you claim, then all you’re doing is replacing native-born unemployed with foreign-born unemployed.
Think, people. For Christ’s sake, think!

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
9 months ago

Britains GDP per capita is also lower than it was 15 years ago, despite large levels of immigration

Matt M
Matt M
9 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

I bow to no-one on my opposition to mass immigration, but I don’t think your figures are right.
UK GDP per capita (in USD):
2009 – $41.7k
2023 – $48.1k
A stronger argument is that between 1988 and 2003 (i.e. the last 15 year period before the mass immigration, i.e. before the A10 expansion of the EU) GDP/capita grew much more strongly:
1988 – $30k
2003 – $41.1k

Andrew Dalton
Andrew Dalton
9 months ago
Reply to  Matt M

I know these figures are all over the place, but the world bank has the UK at $50,000 in 2007 (pre-financial crisis) and $47,000 in 2021.
ONS has it at £31,500 in 2007 and £33,500 in 2022.

There can be issues with exchange rates and purchasing power parity here. The GBP has plummeted compared to the dollar over that period; down from approximately 2.0 to 1.28 (today). This underlies what a poor metric GDP is, particularly for country like the UK which imports so much.

Matt M
Matt M
9 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Dalton

I got my figures here (Trading Economics) which it says are provided by the World Bank. I checked the ONS and yes they are quite different from the WB figures. I wonder whether the difference (apart for exchange rate fluctuations) is that the WB figs seem to be inflation adjusted. Though I can’t see the methodology and haven’t got the time to look for it this morning.
I do see that the ONS figures also show a big increase in GDP/c in that period 1988-2003 when immigration numbers were below 100k per annum:
1988 – £21,605
2003 – £29,286
Diff – +£7,681
Compare 2004-2019 – we had above 400k immigration per year during those 15 years.
2004 – £29,840
2019 – £33,443
Diff – +£3,603

Andrew Dalton
Andrew Dalton
9 months ago
Reply to  Matt M

Could well be inflation adjusted, which would make a significant difference over the past three years.
A purchasing power price parity control would be the best, but I couldn’t find one from a quick search that had 2007/8 and 2022 in.
Statista has a graph that is just described as inflation controlled, which shows:
2007 – $50,457
2024 – $52,426 (not sure if this estimate or real)
That’s a $2,000 increase in 17 years. Or about 4%.
Statista’s population graph for the time period is:
2007 – 61.4M
2024 – 67.95M
That’s a 6.55M increase, or 10.6%. We’re missing a few percentage points of GDP per capita

It’s possible to slice these figures up to get a result to support any argument. However, I find the claim in the article dubious without any referenced methodology. Particularly as an increasing number of academic papers dispute the GDP/GVA advantages of mass immigration.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
9 months ago
Reply to  Matt M

Problem is: any small increase in the country’s putative wealth arising from immigration has gone straight into the pockets of the graduate property-owning class in the form of inflated house prices. Meanwhile the blue collar class has been driven out of the market altogether.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
9 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

You actually mean due to large levels of immigration for that is what is keeping GDP per capita down

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
9 months ago

Fair enough, if taken at face value, but there’s a much wider and rather more profound thesis to be considered,,, to think about: which is whether the West is facing not so much civilisational collapse (the Roman example) as civilisational transition from hegemony to global. redistribution.

If the author has got this right, rather than hand-wringing, might it not be something rather more optimistic? I’m not in a position to make too much sense of this (none if us are, including our governments) but a shift in perspective might be welcomed and, dare i say it, therefore better managed?

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
9 months ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

That’s a fair thing to mention. Personally, I think its good that people are being lifted out of poverty in places like India, Vietnam, Africa, etc. The problem is global aristocrats and multinational corporations are reaping far far too great a share of the profits. If those workers in those places weren’t working for far less than what a western worker in a democratic society would demand, the factories wouldn’t have moved there. In terms of global wealth, finance, and the global aristocracy, the west is still hegemonic. The BRICS alliance is, among other things, an attempt to alter that. The western aristocrat capital class will lose eventually, it’s just a question of how badly, and to whom. If they’re not undone by populist movements in their own countries, they’ll be overwhelmed by China, Russia, and many others who will overthrow the old system and who have no interest in replacing it at all. They’ll just unapologetically pursue the interests of their nations and their people, not send jobs and money overseas to enrich foreigners at the expense of their people. Another way to look at the situation is that for all of human history, nations have been competing for power, wealth, and influence, and it sure does look like we’re losing.

Su Mac
Su Mac
9 months ago

Yes indeed, some unthinking repeat of tropes mixed with interesting ideas. Things overlooked include the most important…

*Western GDP includes govt spending which includes money printing to fund social benefits* Import people, give them nothing jobs on deliveroo, make up the cost of living shortfall with free childcare, rent assistance, health etc, printing new £$$£ into economy to pay for it, thus raising GDP by the back door. Take some tax back off them as well. That ain’t wealth. It is all about the DEBT folks.

Didn’t we see a study last month blowing a hole in the maths of immigrant wealth growth in this mature post industrial Western economy?

His remaining argument is an interesting but not new parallel.

*Britain colonises India for it’s wealth, builds civil and social infrastructure and education to extract it. Eventually India rebels using that infrastruture to move the economic benefits to their own economy.

Re agriculture isn’t USA’s ability to make cheap crops partly dependant on immigrant cheap labour suppressing wages?

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
9 months ago
Reply to  Su Mac

Good point.
Can you post a link to the study you mention?

Su Mac
Su Mac
9 months ago

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/28/low-paid-migration-subsidy-costing-whole-country-dear/ Still looking… but meantime some international references in here.

Sayantani Gupta
Sayantani Gupta
9 months ago
Reply to  Su Mac

This view on colonial India is from?
The education statistics in 1947 in terms of literacy were rather dismal. Though the overall quality of education was perhaps more solid.
Regarding the infrastructure, have you studied the shareholder patterns of the various Railway Companies like BNR, PIR, etc to see how much of dividend outflow there was, as well as the pension outflow to the staff? Mostly British owned and staffed and thus would constitute remittance earnings flowing back to the UK.

Su Mac
Su Mac
9 months ago

Most recent reading was The Corporation That Changed The World by Nick Robbins looking at British East India Company, the Great Drain of India’s wealth etc. So following independence the “stuff left behind” must have been considerable – not to diminish the previous Indian social political systems – but as a platform to competing/standing up to Western economies the process of getting +/- 500? regional princes into one Parliamentary system was quite a shift surely? I am no expert on modern India but it seemed a more real parallel than Rome to my brain.

Sayantani Gupta
Sayantani Gupta
9 months ago
Reply to  Su Mac

Thank you, I shall look this book up.
What you refer to was not done by the British- in fact there were some ICS officers who actively wanted to Balkanise India in 1946 -47 via “Princestan”.
However Attlee and Mountbatten in this regard played ball with Sardar Patel and the States Department which allowed the integration of the 560 plus princely States.
The real contribution of British rule imho were the armed forces.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
9 months ago

What about DOON?

Sayantani Gupta
Sayantani Gupta
9 months ago

Boon? Or precursor to ” gloom and doom”?! Merely along with its imitators- Loretto, John Connon, Mayo et al created a permanently displaced citizenry of the ” Land of Might Have Been”.( Eternal Empire)

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
9 months ago

The Doon School, Dehradun.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
8 months ago

I know Indian nationalists tend to be one irritated when this is stated, but India spent the vast majority of this time as a distinct civilizational region politically divided – in that respect very much like post-Roman Europe (Christendom!). The Mughals and the British came closest to unifying it, but both of course eventually lost power, not to say the will, to continue to rule this vast region.

In this long historical context, there was no inevitable reason why the subcontinent should have been united after independence, as of course it wasn’t! Hyderabad may have been incorporated but Pakistan and later Bangladesh became separate states and there’s no joining them back. The modern state of Pakistan, however badly it has been governed in practice makes sense as a geographically coherent state. They actually had a reasonable objection to the Republic of India taking on that particular title, because the Indus runs through Pakistan, and India (a Western term) is named after that river (or is cognate with it)! The province of Sindh, also a related name, of course lies in Pakistan.

To challenge another shibboleth, Kashmir is a Himalayan state mostly lying outside the subcontinent properly speaking. It would probably have been far better off as an independent state rather than being fought over between India and Pakistan.

Sayantani Gupta
Sayantani Gupta
8 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

Don’t agree. This view by the way is not just of ” nationalists” but of most Indians.
Read the first line of the Indian constitution” India that is Bharat”.
And the very unraveling of Pakistan shows you to be highly mistaken( Baluchistan, Khyber etc)
Wrong analysis.
You seem to be fairly ignorant of ancient Indian history and the sacred geography which united the subcontinent from Afghanistan to Kanya Kumari.
Bloopers as the origins of Sindh point to your staggering ignorance of ” Sindhu” Pradesh
Poor try Mr Fisher. Read up before wading into history of the subcontinent.

Philip Tisdall
Philip Tisdall
9 months ago
Reply to  Su Mac

American agriculture is a huge industry, too big for most generalizations except one: it is highly mechanized (I.e. capital intensive). Some foods stuffs such as fruits and vegetables use manual labor but cheap immigrant labor, which I think is your reference, merely puts off mechanical solutions.

Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
9 months ago

There’s a very high cost for the invasion into the USA. Cities including Boston, Chicago, New York and Denver and many others are screaming bloody murder for the high cost and difficulty in housing millions of illegals. And never has there been a louder cry for ‘affordable housing’ by American citizens. Biden has allowed 6 million people into the country over three years. Where does he think they are going to live? Houses can’t and won’t be built fast enough for a variety of reasons. Add in inflation and high interest rates. Biden’s ‘Open Border’ policy is not working for average AmerIcans albeit no doubt the elites in the Democrat party love having their lawns mowed and their children attended to. And yes, this is a class issue.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
9 months ago

You’re very much correct. This author is an apologist for globalism and thus an expert at conjuring accurate statistics that sound convincing but upon close scrutiny either turn out to not actually reflect what is claimed and/or would lead to utterly bizarre corollaries if true. We’ve been hearing these kinds of arguments for three decades and we’re tired of hearing it. Rehashing the same arguments is why the establishment parties keep losing. People don’t care about GDP. They see high wage manufacturing jobs replaced with low wage service jobs and they don’t like it, and that’s only considering economics. There’s no mention at all of the cultural, social, and political implications of mass immigration. The people are just expected to deal with it because the economy (read the globalized aristocrat class) needs workers but only if they’re cheap and docile and can give them a sufficient return on investment, just like the people are expected to just deal with the lack of manufacturing jobs and change themselves to suit whatever the economy in their area happens to need.

Laurence Siegel
Laurence Siegel
8 months ago

Immigration amounting to 1% of the country’s total existing population, NOT a 1% increase in the number of immigrants, produces a GDP that is higher by 2%.
Economists sometimes have trouble writing clearly. I fix it for them.

Sayantani Gupta
Sayantani Gupta
9 months ago

A well intentioned article.
However I think at least in its depiction of India the author needed to have gone into more of the political economy. Till 1991 the country was mostly socialist and had a command control economy run by a dynastic colonial era elite.
The great ” unshackling” only occured due to major social changes triggering a change in the nature of politics- from a handful of public school Oxbridge types to a non- elite discourse.
Co- inciding with near economic bankruptcy which forced a pragmatic non -dynast Prime minister to go in for market reforms. Which in turn created a new class of entrepreneurship which has only gathered pace over the last decades.
India’s recent strides have solely been because of a committed political leadership and technological advancements to break the rich poor divide even more. There are of course various vested interests both external and internal to stall the process and bring back the old centralised venality driven economy.
In fact the West needs to support India’s further advancement not only as a democratic counter to China; but also to stem any immigration of the most talented, whose expensive STEM education is subsidised by Indian taxpayers, but whose ” brain drain” works to disadvantage, other than adding to immigration to the West.
It appears to me as an outsider to the West, that were America in particular to revive its manufacturing advantage and retain its undoubted edge in research and development; and not succumb to being dragged into global “policing “or being torn apart by internal contradictions, it would still be the power it was.

Martin Johnson
Martin Johnson
9 months ago

Your perception of America is dead-on correct. Whether we in America take heed, addicted as we are to debt as a substitute for brains and work and making hard choices, is a very open question.

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
9 months ago

Unconvinced by this piece – the central thesis has the focus of a single historical parallel, and a not particularly persuasive one at that – for example alluding to China as a “new actor” is plain ludicrous.

There is at the heart of this piece a massive, technology-shaped hole, which completely ignores humanity’s very obvious and visible trendline: a relentless, inexorable and shockingly rapid march towards a total breakdown point, the so-called singularity, beyond which everything changes suddenly and violently, which we are clearly approaching, right about now (as in, sometime between today and a century).

Martin M
Martin M
9 months ago

Yet another otherwise excellent article where the author feels they have to mention climate change.

Peter Principle
Peter Principle
9 months ago

Prof. Heather asserts that “the vast majority of the developing modern periphery is showing not the slightest desire (or indeed need) to invade the old imperial core”. That is simply not true. When those in the “periphery”, e.g. young Africans, are questioned, the MAJORITY want to move to Europe and the proportion wanting to move is increasing. Just Google it!
Prof Heather makes Kenya his poster boy, pointing out their 7% annual GDP growth. Per capita GDP in Kenya is, according to the IMF, $2,190. 7% of that is $153 and it is very easy to get that kind of change when moving away from a subsistence economy. Anyway, much of this is due to demographics: the shape of the population pyramid means that more young people are joining the workforce than old people leaving it. Life expectancy is 61, so many die in harness, and population growth is 2% per year.
In the UK meanwhile, GDP went DOWN last year by 0.7%, yet the government brought in a million immigrants (though net inward migration was 600,000). Prof. Heather says that “average unemployment rates have not increased”, but this ignores the fact that the UK (according to UK Parliament’s labour market statistics) has 9.28 million people of working age who are economically inactive. This is an inactivity rate of 21.9% and last year it increased by 100,000.
Prof Heather says that “every 1% increase in legal migrant numbers … adds an average 2% to GDP”. That is the same bogus argument that has warped the Tory party’s thinking on immigration. What we need is an increase in per capita GDP through increased productivity. Just bloating the workforce with low-skilled immigrants increase GDP simply because they are (for now) of working age, but it does not improve productivity. And Prof. Heather has ignored the fact that the UK has allowed low-skilled immigrants to bring in their dependents with them.

Leslie Smith
Leslie Smith
8 months ago

I read an economic history of the world by a Swiss economic historian several years ago, and he noted that because the Romans had a labor surplus primarily from their slave population, this was a disincentive for them to develop more productive and less labor intensive economic structure, and there were few innovations by the Romans during their primacy. It seems that the huge increase in migration is also acting as a disincentive for the USA and other nations, while Japan and South Korea, which have very restrictive immigration policies are developing advanced labor-saving equipment, e.g., robotic lettuce harvesters, etc. Is all this immigration going to make the USA look a lot more like a 3rd world nation that won’t adopt labor-saving advance because it would increase unemployment?

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
9 months ago

When discussing civilizational collapse, Peter Heather could do well to learn from J.M. Greer, who is syndicated here.
The fall of Rome was the result of the imposition of barbarians onto an overtaxed, frail and demographically collapsing state (sound familiar?), the violence in this case being almost incidental to the process. Further, this article seem to take for granted the premise that human beings are just interchangeable economic units which will perform X amount of labour (as determined by the ever-vaunted GDP) regardless of what that labor is or where. A very tabula raza way of looking at things.

Richard Pearse
Richard Pearse
9 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Good point. The millions flowing almost automatically into the US since Biden day one, includes, for example, 500,000 young Chinese males (any chance one of them report to the CCP army?), millions of Africans and Haitians , not to mention the millions from Central and South America (including the illegal Venezuelan who recently violently raped and murdered a college girl In Georgia).

None of these non-European peoples had any experience in their countries of origin with self-governance, and all of who come expecting to be taken care of, if they can’t find illegal work. The number of these illegals since Biden day one is greater than the population of about 22 of the States in the US.

THEY will impact the nature of American (and whats now left of Western) culture can’t be good. Biden has managed to pull this off in about three years. Alas.

Leslie Smith
Leslie Smith
8 months ago
Reply to  Richard Pearse

Biden has been aided and abetted by George Soros’s Open Society funding, Wall Street/businesses’ cheap labor agenda, and the Dem Party’s cheap voter agenda. The US public and the USA are paying the price for this invasion.

John Riordan
John Riordan
9 months ago

I do believe there’s a soft landing for the West as the rest of the globe catches up to Western living standards. The West will, of course, lose access to the sort of cheap manufacturing that is available through ultra-low labour rates, but as this happens, the total amount of specialised product will rise enormously, so economies of scale will take the place of low labour prices as the foundation of material abundance, aided by the inevitable advances of AI and robotics.

This does, of course, also depend upon advances in energy generation, food production and materials technology, but those challenges are not nearly as difficult as western policymakers would have us all believe. One thing the West has to get real about however is this fatuously stupid and offensive habit of telling developing nations that they can’t have cheap hydrocarbon energy. We’ll end up a world war unless we stop that ignorant claptrap.

L Tee
L Tee
9 months ago
Reply to  John Riordan

As time progresses, it is becoming apparent that it’s more a question of the West cratering to catch up to the rest of the worlds living standards (with the exception of a handful of ultra-wealthy elites who often have three or more citizenships) – a return to the historical mean in other words.
I’m also not sure I agree with your techno-positive outlook, but I appreciate your thoughtful comment all the same

Jon Morrow
Jon Morrow
9 months ago

We are in something of a death spiral induced by expansion on the money supply. Led by the US since 1971, trillions of dollars worth of goods and services have been effectively confiscated from the global market by profligate governments and wasted. This has reduced supply and pushed up prices for the poorest in the west, to a degree, but mostly for the poorest non-western populations. If governments return to a sound money system then many of these issues will disappear. Are we prepared to vote for governments which won’t give us freebies?

Wilfred Davis
Wilfred Davis
9 months ago

A very interesting article. But two observations:
the briefest of searches on the internet brings up studies offering widely diverging statistics on whether immigration is a net benefit or net cost economically. So whose figures are reliable?in terms of public concern about mass immigration, the economic effects are not the only issue. It’s not just about money.

Wilfred Davis
Wilfred Davis
9 months ago
Reply to  Wilfred Davis

Sorry about the formatting: the numbered paragraphing while composing doesn’t seem to carry through to the appearance as posted.

D Glover
D Glover
9 months ago

Why is it assumed that a growing population is necessary at all? If a birth rate of less than 2.1 per woman led to a gradual decrease, that would have some good consequences.
We could approach self-sufficiency in food. We’d have enough houses. We wouldn’t be tight on water supply every summer. We wouldn’t need more schools, power stations, hospitals, prisons and roads.
A growing population grows the economy, but is that all a nation is? Just an economy that needs more people to operate it.

Mike Downing
Mike Downing
9 months ago
Reply to  D Glover

I think the argument is that we have to grow the economy to service the vast amounts of debt. If the economy were to shrink, the debt would suddenly look unsustainable and we’d be declared bankrupt.

D Glover
D Glover
9 months ago
Reply to  Mike Downing

How far can you grow a population before it becomes completely unsustainable? The UK population is now nearly 68 million. Can we grow that figure indefinitely or is there a ceiling?
I believe that Argentina has been bankrupt a few times.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
9 months ago
Reply to  D Glover

It’s interesting that in a time when we are bombarded with the concept of sustainability on everything else that no one applies the term to a country. You raise an interesting point.

Seb Dakin
Seb Dakin
8 months ago
Reply to  D Glover

In Japan, birthrates are low, and immigration is way lower than for developed economies in the West, and now total population is starting to decrease.
Housing is affordable, you can get seen by a doctor or dentist very quickly, the transportation system is excellent, the police will respond very quickly to burglaries etc. Stuff works. So as you say, there are good consequences to a gradual decrease, or even stasis.
At some point though the question arises of what happens when a smaller and smaller working population needs to pay down debts dating from a larger previous one, which can mean actual government debt but also pension obligations. One can only hope productivity per person rises at a rate fast enough to offset the fall in the absolute number of people.

Kat L
Kat L
8 months ago
Reply to  D Glover

Sure just don’t expect a social safety net or enough people to defend the country from invasion. It’s not going to be a gradual leveling out.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
9 months ago

“In other words, migrants did literally and materially displace the Romans.”
What does the author think is happening in this country?

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
9 months ago

wealth generation in the West — which is neither steady-state nor agricultural — has become effectively dependent on flows of migrant labour.
Perhaps, IF the newly-arrived labor brings with it skills that the host nation requires, and IF the newly-arrived labor comes intending to assimilate into its new home, and IF the newly-arrived labor learns the local language. Because absent those things, what you have is not wealth generation or economic growth; what you have is societal erosion.
There are a couple of places in this piece that work hard to shoehorn “legal” immigration into the discussion, which might make sense if that’s what was causing the upset. But it’s not and everyone knows that. Presumably, so does the good professor, who also presumably understands that open borders and a welfare state cannot co-exist. This is painfully obvious in one jurisdiction, one country, after another.

Phil Rees
Phil Rees
9 months ago

A very interesting essay, but some quibbles.

First, “Rome’s economy was overwhelmingly agricultural, and steady-state.” This doesn’t seem correct. Rome’s economy was based around its central principle – of always being the apex predator, by creating vast standing legions of soldiers, and defeating all opposition to its growth. And to assist this it bestowed Roman citizenship very widely across its conquests. Those two things together would account for a vast growth in GDP. So not steady-state and not agricultural. Arguably it was that growth which could not be continued indefinitely.

Second, “In the 5th century, therefore, the ancient Roman West was carved up by immigrant-warrior groups whose greater size and coherence were the direct result of centuries of coexistence with imperial power. And this is where our own real parallels with Roman history lie.” But here, and elsewhere, the author overlooks the division into West and East empires, with the latter continuing another 1000 years despite the threats from large and equally coherent warrior groups.

Overall I think the parallels between our situation and that of Rome don’t really hold up at all.

Peter Mott
Peter Mott
9 months ago

❝Everywhere else, birth rates are below this level and in some cases — particularly Germany, Hungary, and Japan — far below.❞ An odd choice because there is nothing special about the first two at 1.59. Japan at 1.39 is lower. But so are China at 1.45 and South Korea at 1.11. In fact it’s an odd piece in many ways …
Source: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/total-fertility-rate/country-comparison/

George K
George K
9 months ago

“currently only Iceland and Israel are producing the canonical 2.1 average children” Both names raised my suspicion. Too low for a Nordic country and too low for a country with a large religious population. A quick search yielded 1.72 for Iceland (still highest among Nordic countries but surely not the replacement level ) and 2.9 for Israel.

Ardath Blauvelt
Ardath Blauvelt
9 months ago

The US admits about 1 million legal immigrants a year and we now undercount (got aways) 2 + million a year illegals. So much for most are legal. The US is also underemployed by a lot, without counting our additional 7or so million implanted illegals of the last 3 years — who are where? doing what? A new work force, at$20 minimum wage? This is insane. Borders mean something: orderly admission of vetted immigrants with a future in their new land; not a helter-skelter influx with no good chance of a decent life, thanks to self-serving promoters. Folks who will win the power and money from the business of illegal anything – as usual.

Jake Raven
Jake Raven
9 months ago

If mass immigration into Britain is so good why are we not seeing the economy picking up, and why is GDP per capita declining along with productivity?
I don’t accept that 1% of migrants generate 2% GDP. That may be true for the high skilled, high paid, but not the low skilled, low paid. They along with their families put pressure on our services and infrastructure and take more from the state than they contribute.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
9 months ago

Ultimately it’s clearly destroying our culture western society and environment … we are not designed to be multicultural … multiethnic can work at low levels. We have not evolved to deal with it emotionally. Islamism is a huge problem too that we are not strong enough to deal with.

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
9 months ago

It’s worth noting that the “collapse” of the Roman Empire was only disasterous for the upper-class holders of all the wealth and property. The majority of the populace of the Italian peninsula and the adjacent areas went on with their lives pretty much as before. In fact they created new wealth, new art, new businesses, a localized economy made up of small-holders, shop keepers, etc. and a crazy quilt of semi-independent cities. Even the advent of feudalism did less to stifle the people than it did in Northern Europe. (For a while. Eventually that boot came down hard; it wasn’t til Mussolini’s time that the peasantry managed to get out from under it.)

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
9 months ago

average unemployment rates have not increased despite all the recent population inflows.
Not true in the UK. We disguise our unemployment as ‘disability’.

G M
G M
9 months ago

Western society has produced a rich free civilisation.
Change that civilisation, by ideology or massive immigration that does not believe in the tenets of that civilisation, and the result might not be as free and/or rich.

G M
G M
9 months ago

Canada has had massive immigration but it’s GDP/capita is decreasing.

Canada used to be the 5th or 6th richest country in the world but after massive immigration is now 15th.

Jürg Gassmann
Jürg Gassmann
9 months ago

The depiction of the “Fall of the Roman Empire” (of the West – the East continued strongly for centuries) is antiquated. There was a lot of migration from the Germanic East, but the modern understanding of how it worked in practice has evolved.
Roman administration relied on delegated power; Rome did not want stray individuals coming in, they obliged a clutch of would-be immigrants to give themselves an internal structure, then admitted this group, allocated them an area to settle, and ruled through the internal structure of the group. Along with the organisation, they were invited to give themselves a name – so these “peoples” or “tribes” were an artefact of Roman administration, not a pre-existing ethnicity.
The decay of the Roman Empire of the West was a consequence of economic stresses brought about by many factors, among them ever rising military spending. The Roman treasury was no longer able to honour the deals they had done with the settled tribes, which at the same time provided the bulk of the soldiery for the Roman Army. The depredations by the “Germanic tribes” were by the “tribes” settled inside the Empire, not from beyond its borders. One of the most devastatingly successful of these “tribal chiefs”, Alaric, was a general in the Roman who had been passed over for command and decided to privatise ”his” “Goths”, much like Russian oligarchs in the 90s privatised the Soviet assets they had access to.
For Roman authors, “barbarian” was not an ethnic description, but a political term. While Alaric was a Roman officer, he was not a barbarian; when he rebelled against Roman authority, he turned into a barbarian. Today, he might be termed a “populist” or “far right”.
The collapse of the Roman imperial administrative structures in the western half of the Empire was a long process, that started in the 3rd century and did not end until centuries past the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476 by another “barbarian” Roman general, Odoacer.

Luke Lea
Luke Lea
9 months ago

“In comparison, wealth generation in the West — which is neither steady-state nor agricultural — has become effectively dependent on flows of migrant labour.”
The United States did fine in the aftermath of the 1920’s immigration reforms, which greatly restricted the flows of migrant labour. New technologies embedded in real physical capital is the real source of wealth generation. A country’s capital/population ratio is a good proxy of its level of economic development. How that development is shared between labor and capital is another question altogether. A legislative question, I might add. See here for instance: https://shorturl.at/nCFGQ

John Wood
John Wood
9 months ago

Dubious statistics used in the article

Walter Marvell
Walter Marvell
8 months ago

Surely we have now punctured the gross Big Lie about the wealth effect of mass immigration? This has been an unchallenged 10 year propagandist trope of the progressive liberal classes whose Midas like property gains were connected directly to the crazed uncontrolled arrival of 600-1m migrants a year and non supply of new housing. The majority of the new millions are already takers of State money and benefits (education, housing, NHS midwifery) not net contributors. Imagine the cost when this army of very low wage workers and taxi drivers reach retirement age? It is a ticking timebomb for an already debt drenched State. As many here observe, the famed 2% ‘growth’ in GDP includes State spending. So it is not new wealth. How we all will pay and suffer for this Treasury Orthodoxy and the willing cynical lies of their fellow Open Border fanatics (bent academics/BBC/Remainers/Big Business).

Su Mac
Su Mac
8 months ago
Reply to  Walter Marvell

I remember reading in Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe how the initial estimate of immigrant net wealth producing effect by Blair was calculated before they started pushing it.

They used a typical immigrant of “educated, French, IT expert business, self starter” to generate positive modelling and that nonsense has had the shelf life of the Popeye and spinach myth!

RIRO is the rule for modelling as we know!

David Yetter
David Yetter
8 months ago

All comparisons with the standard telling of the history of the late Roman Empire are intrinsically uninteresting because the standard telling is wrong.
First, the “Fall of Rome” in 476 was a non-event: the retirement of the last Western Augustus to a villa near Naples at the behest of the Eastern Augustus and primary Emperor with his seat at Constantinople, who regarded the western office as redundant since the King of the Ostrogoths in his role as Patrician of the Romans could manage Imperial affairs in the old homeland of the Empire just fine.
The Empire actually fell in 1453 to the Turks, after dwindling to a city-state over the course of the previous century and a half.
Second, the collapse of literacy in the West was not due to the barbarian invasions. Visgothic Spain and Merovingian France were fully literate societies, even as was the Empire with its capital at Constantiople (which Constantine himself had called “New Rome”). Henri Pirenne’s thesis that the destruction of the papyrus trade by the Islamic conquest of Egypt cause the collapse of literacy is far more convincing. The Germanic barbarians, by and large, wanted to sign up and become Romans (at least culturally, even if they wanted to be the ones in control). Even the Visigoths who sacked Rome were Christians (albeit Aryan heretics) who respected the right of the Church to grant sanctuary during the traditional 3-day sack of the city. Not so the Muslims.
So long as the immigrants assimilate to the dominant culture (esp. linguistic, political and economic culture) of their new homeland, there is no problem. Guess which immigrants are absolutely resistant to assimilating…

William Amos
William Amos
8 months ago
Reply to  David Yetter

With respect, and I don’t keep up with developments in historiography, what you propose is broadly the argument advanced by Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire which ends with the fall of Constantionople
Is this no longer the ‘standard telling’?

William Amos
William Amos
8 months ago

Terrific article and some much needed perspective on the subject.
Whn we talk about ‘invasions’ and ‘migrations’ It is always bracing to remember that King George VI had only 47,000,000 subjects in the Home Nations but had 50,000,000 African subjects, 15,000,000 East Asian subjects and 300,000,000 Indian Subjects. Without any distinction in rights, status or duties in the eyes of the law. The argument about the demographics of the British Isles must bear that fact in mind. The vast Majority of British subjects, at least in the last 250 years have been non ethnic English.
Added to that the historic ‘British Diaspora’ numbers about 200,000,000 reaching across the globe and has permanently affected population structures in three continents. Britain also has the most expatriates of any developed nation at 3,000,000 citizens living abroad. Added to that at least 400,000 British People emigrate every year
The ‘independence movements’ which ushered in the Bandung Generation and seemed like ‘the future – once’ now appear an anachronisitc blip, looking back to a Romantic nationalism of the European 19th century. The logic of Imperium could be argued to have continued largely unaffected by national movements in the Third World.
We are all children of Empire. The existing network of states, nations, regional groupings, religions and ethnic groups is the long legacy of the British Empire and remains the definitional model of global development.

Kat L
Kat L
8 months ago

In the meantime here’s what is actually happening… https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shawn-ryan-show/id1492492083?i=1000649559637

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
8 months ago

There’s so much simply wrong, deliberately, elided or avoided in this article it is difficult to know where to start. I would say Peter Heather should stick to his history books, which are undoubtedly pretty good.

There is no inevitability about whether political units collapse completely or not under stress or whether they instead are massively transformed. This is the latter which is happening in western societies. And this unprecedented transformation of supposedly democratic simply doesn’t have the consent of the population. It’s quite absurd to say that Britain needs in some fundamental sense net migration of 700,000 or more per annum to fill vacancies when we have one in we have five million people of working age economically inactive. They may well be trade-offs politicians should be honest about them but that does not mean that the only solution is mass migration and cultural transformation.

We get the usual inevitabilism insisted on by people on the left of politics. There’s nothing inevitable about immigration. Japan has low levels; Denmark has radically reduced migration; Saudi Arabia allowed precisely zero migrant refugees created by the Syrian Civil War despite the close cultural similarity. This is a matter of political choice and will.

We can also chose which migrants we want to see arrive and frankly decide that some countries are much closer culturally and stability to ours than others. There is reason why the entire families of migrant workers should we admitted to the country, or if they are so, that both the migrants and their families should expect to acquire de facto or de jure citizenship! This is the model of the Gulf States practice quite successfully it seems